American Geography
Matt Black
With his project American Geography Matt Black concentrates on people living in poverty. On his six years, 100.000 mile road trip across 46 states of the United States he explored “the geography of poverty”. His book deals with the flip side of the American Dream.
In 2013, Matt Black (born 1970), began photographing isolated communities in California’s Central Valley, the rural agricultural area where he lives. In 2015, Black expanded the project to encompass the whole of the United States. Since then he has completed four additional trips making work across 46 states. What had begun as a story of individual isolated communities grew into a portrait of a divided and unequal America.
Black has been collecting the stories of people in the same way that FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange have between 1935 and 1944. Just like then it compels us to a greater understanding of what it is to live in poverty. Black kept notes throughout his travels which are included in the book. Their inclusion is a welcome addition. They give us more information how to read the photographs.
Matt Black’s American Geography stands in a long tradition of road trip observations by photographers. One of them is the Swiss photographer Robert Frank. His book The Americans from 1959 is legendary for its contribution to the demystification of the American Dream. And Matt Black’s American Geography stands, so the subtitle reads, as another major reckoning with this dream.
More recent, in his book River’s Dream Curran Hatleberg has treated the same subject: living in a small rural community in the United States. And poverty is part of their existence. But his treatment is different. Matt Black’s vision isn’t uplifting while Curran Hattleberg is hopeful. The American Dream is admittely unattainable but is replaced by River’s Dream: family and friends.
During his travels Black has taken routes that allowed him to cross the country without ever crossing above the poverty line. Each dot on the map in his book which he visited represents a city or town in which more than 1 in 5 people live in poverty. Rather than being anomalies he found thtat each community is separated by no more than a two-hour drive.
For so many living in poverty in America, the similarities outweigh any geographical differences. And although the book still is divided in four geographical chapters, Black is very convincing that it’s not a geographical but an American problem. He shows us a country far from unlimited possibilities and a American society largely characterized by poverty, lack of opportunity and political resignation.
American Geography
Photographter: Matt Black
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published in 2021
Hardcover, stitched binding, 168 pages, 97 b&w illustrations, 26,2 x 26,5 cm
Shortlisted for the Lucie Photobook Prize 2021
Chosen by people immersed in the photobook world as one of their favorite photobooks of 2021