Photographs of Gregory Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook.

I went to the University of Madison, Wisconsin in 2000, a liberal bastion in the heart of the conservative Midwest. Typically, New Yorkers stayed in the private dorms but I wanted to make friends with locals, so I chose the worst structurally of the public dorms, Ogg Hall. The solemn 1965 cinderblock full of raucous cornfed hulking students, who unlike me were more often than not to be top of their class in High School. I loved it all — Ogg, Madison, Wisconsin, everything except the harsh winters.

Ogg turned out to be a smart decision, as the automatic question asked when locals found out I was from New York was, “Which dorm are you staying in?” People’s eyes lit up when I said Ogg.

On my floor, I made a group of friends from the town of McFarland, right outside of Madison. They relished showing off the quirks of Wisconsin and taking me out of my comfort zone. When I visited their families, I was shocked at their parents’ and grandparents’ homes adorned in Badgers football tchotchkes, massive couches, cornfield views from their kitchen windows. Beer and ice fishing got them through the severe winters. A few had never heard of hummus. The frozen pizza aisles alone in their supermarkets had the same square footage as my local bodega. Delivery pizza was often thick and doughy, usually arriving with ranch dressing to dip.

A few weeks into my freshman year, they took me outside the city to one of the biggest cultural shocks of my life, a massive steakhouse named Prime Quarter with a giant grill in the middle of the restaurant. You walked to the fridge, grabbed a steak and some Texas toast, and plopped it on the grill. I had never grilled food before. Large metal cylinders were filled with melted butter and paintbrushes. Butter, bread, and meat. It was like Korean BBQ with only three ingredients, and steak at scale.

(I sent these two paragraph to my friend Grant, who just replied, “You want me to point out factual inaccuracies, or would you just like to move forward with this blatant hit piece as-is?” Which means it needs no further edits.)

(Second addition: “Annnnd, I’m sure you don’t want to mention the salad bar at Prime Quarter, as that might weaken the agenda that Wisconsinites only eat fat people food, but baked potatoes were another staple at that restaurant.”)

*Just for clarification, I think Madison is a world cultural and scientific hub and this piece is meant lovingly, but it did have some Cracker Barrel edges back in 2000.

I’ve been fascinated by the Midwest ever since. And it was a very masculine time in America, with Bush, 9/11, wars, drinking culture, steroids in baseball. Poker was exploding on television, Napster reigned, and the early stages of the social internet were forming with AOL transitioning to thefacebook.com. An early bootlegged copy of Photoshop helped me flood the school with fake IDs in 2001, the money of which funded my first digital camera, a 6.3 megapixel Canon 10D.

I recall coming across Gregory Halpern’s 2009, Omaha Sketchbook at the Strand and paging through it a few times. It was gorgeous, reminiscent of a sketchbook of construction paper with varnished work prints pasted in. I came close to pulling the trigger, but it was a bit of money and I ultimately put it back. Some years later, once I realized I should get it, it was sold out and massively expensive. But to my delight, it was recently reprinted with 35 new images. It was probably best that I held off on owning it until now, as it transports me back to that time in my life.

During my quick first read-through in the busy Strand, I didn’t notice the theme of Masculinity (as the book has some photos of women), and it just felt like my experience in Wisconsin. The book is a bit of a sausage-fest as friends would say in the dead of winter, once women stopped going to the freezing parties, leaving just groups of seasonally depressed boys to drink from kegs of Natty Light in damp stone basements. The book is described as: “Compiled over fifteen years of photographing Omaha, Nebraska, the book forms a prescient meditation on America, the men and boys who inhabit it, and the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power.”

Omaha Sketchbook (which I highly suggest adding to your collection) continues as a stunningly beautiful historic document, but it has also aged incredibly well, turning into a prescient book on the crisis of masculinity in America, with the Manosphere, Gamergate, Andrew Tate, Netflix’s new Adolescence. A scary time to be a parent, to say the least. Halpern caught the winds blowing.

 

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