Matt Black

About Matt's Work

Matt Black is a photographer chronicling people and landscapes in marginalized communities across the United States. In distinctive black and white images, Black compels viewers to grapple with the prevalence of poverty in the United States and its impacts on daily life for many Americans.

Much of Black’s work focuses on the rural agricultural communities near his home in California’s Central Valley. In series such as The Dry Land (2014), Black shows the impact of sustained drought on the region’s migrant farmworkers. For a subsequent body of work, Black traveled around the United States by car and bus from 2014 to 2020 to photograph cities and towns where 20 percent or more of the population lives below the poverty line. Black visited locations in 46 states and Puerto Rico, from small rural towns in central California to larger cities such as El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. Images of empty streets, boarded-up buildings, and remnants of industry recur across hundreds of locations. Black uses blown-out highlights and deep, dark grays and blacks to create compositions that are at once striking and spare. The images visualize the conditions of impoverishment faced by so many communities in the United States. Black shows that poverty is not an aberration but rather a defining feature of the American landscape. In two short films and a book entitled American Geography (2021), Black includes field notes, journal entries, and audio recordings that convey the humanity of the individuals he encountered in his travels. A companion book, American Artifacts (2024), features images of some of the nearly 3,000 objects Black collected from the towns he visited. Assemblages of plastic silverware, panhandling signs, twisted wire coat hangers, lottery tickets, lighters, empty cigarette packages, and other detritus show the struggles and hard realities of life in the places he visited.

Currently, Black is working on a new project about mining across the Western United States. He is also documenting the impacts of rising temperatures, reduced precipitation, and widespread wildfires across the region. His thermal images in black and white capture burn scars in the Sierra Nevada mountain range and heat emanating from seared and barren landscapes. Black’s humanistic vision makes the realities of inequality visible and aims to mobilize society to face the issue directly.