Matt Black

The companion volume to Matt Black’s critically acclaimed American Geography presents a deeper view of his six-year odyssey documenting poverty in the United States of America. During his six-year journey across the United States creating the project that became American Geography, Matt Black collected objects in the locations he visited. Each location is designated as an area of ‘concentrated poverty’ – a US Census definition for places with poverty rates of 20% or higher. Over time, the objects he found and collected began to take on symbolic significance. As Black crisscrossed the United States, his collection grew into the thousands: plastic spoons and forks, lottery tickets, liquor bottles, lighters and matchbooks. Some items were important, like job applications, medical paperwork, driver’s licenses; some were lost personal effects, like family photographs, bracelets, eyeglasses, notes and letters. And there was the detritus of labour: work gloves, broken tools and supplies, wire, bolts, padlocks and bent nails. This new monograph, presented as a companion volume to Black’s seminal photobook, American Geography, presents photographs of these objects, assemblages and collages, previously unpublished images from American Geography, and the voices of those who are cut off from the ‘American Dream’. These humble, discarded objects form a portrait of America assembled from its roadways and sidewalks, an archaeology of dispossession. For those who follow Black’s photographic work and his unflinching critique of inequality in the United States, this book is an essential volume.

American Geography is the visual record of Magnum photographer Matt Black's five-year, 100,000-mile road trip across 46 states of the United States, plus Puerto Rico. It examines the conditions of powerlessness, prejudice and pragmatism among America's poor. The project originated in Matt Black's exploration of his own home town in California's rural Central Valley - a place that has been called 'the other California' - where one third of the population lives in poverty. Travelling out from that location in 2015, he went on to visit designated 'poverty areas' - places with poverty rates of above 20% as defined by the US census. He found that, rather than being anomalies, 'poverty areas' are never more than two-hour's drive apart. They are woven throughout the fabric of the country, yet are cut off from the 'land of opportunity'. Matt Black's compelling black and white photographs, from which one can trace a line back to the FSA Photographers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, are accompanied by his own travelogue - an eclectic combination of observations, overheard conversations in cafes and city buses, diner menus, bus timetables, historical facts and echoes from daily news reports - which enrich the vivid portrait of these 'states of un-America.' With 100 illustrations in colour