In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history.

Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling portrait of Guadeloupe and its inhabits, focusing on local histories and experiences. Let the Sun Beheaded Be commingles life and death, nature and culture, and beauty and decay in enigmatic color images of the archipelago’s residents and lush landscape, as well as monuments related to the brutality of its past.

The project is part of Immersion, a program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Gregory Halpern (born in Buffalo, New York, 1977) received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2014, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to Let the Sun Beheaded Be, he has published five other books of his work, including ZZYZX (2016), Confederate Moons (2018), and Omaha Sketchbook (2019). He teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York.

Clément Chéroux is the newly appointed Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Previously, he was the senior curator in the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and chief curator of photography at the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and educator. His publication One Wall a Web (2018) won the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award.