David Schonauer
The New Yorker Wednesday April 22, 2015
Photographer Matt Black has spent years documenting life in impoverished indigenous communities of southern Mexico, for an ongoing project
called “The People of Clouds.” Last year, while Black was working in the regions of La Montaña and the Costa Chica, in the state of Guerrero, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal
School, in the nearby city of Iguala, went missing. Many of the students came from the same regions that Black had been photographing, and after their disappearance, he spoke with some of the
students’ family members, and with citizens who are struggling to defend themselves against the rampant crime and poverty. See his work at the New Yorker. See also a video Black shot in Guerrero. Read the full Story >>
Thames & Hudson Wednesday September 15, 2021
When Magnum photographer Matt Black began exploring his hometown in California’s rural Central Valley—dubbed “the other California,” where one-third of the population lives in poverty—he knew what his next project had to be, notes Thames & Hudson, which has published Black’s new book American Geography. Black traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 states and Puerto Rico to create a portrait of some of the poorest communities across the US — the largely unseen and forgotten America. See also: Magnum. Read the full Story >>
Anastasia Gallery Monday September 14, 2015
On view at New York City’s Anastasia Gallery through November 1 is photographer Matt Black’s series “The Geometry of Poverty,” which combines images, geolocation, and poverty
data to map American’s marginalized communities. The project began on Black’s Instagram feed in his home region, the Central Valley of California, where, he notes, poverty conditions rival
those of many Third World countries. Black began a three-month road trip in June, documenting over 70 cities, towns, and rural communities in the US. Read the full Story >>
Anastasia Gallery Tuesday September 9, 2014
Matt Black grew up in a small town in California’s Central Valley, the vast agricultural heart of the state, and went on to become an
award-winning documentary photographer. For his multi-year series “The Kingdom of Dust,” Black returned to his roots to explore the underside of contemporary rural life in the shadow of
some of America's richest farms. That work, and a twin project called "The People of the Clouds," which explores a Mexican farming community, is being shown through October 19 at New York City's
Anastasia Gallery. Read the full Story >>
The New Yorker Monday April 6, 2015
Photographer Matt Black has spent years documenting life in impoverished indigenous communities of southern Mexico, for an ongoing project
called “The People of Clouds.” Last year, while Black was working in the regions of La Montaña and the Costa Chica, in the state of Guerrero, forty-three students from the
Ayotzinapa Normal School, in the nearby city of Iguala, went missing. The New Yorker features a video shot by Black and edited by Sky Dylan-Robbins based on Black’s work in Guererro. Called
The Monster in the Mountains, the video is beautiful and stark, echoing the words of one human rights activist Black interviewed: “Both heaven and hell are in this country,” he
says. Read the full Story >>
TIME LightBox Friday October 16, 2015
Documentary photographer Matt Black has been award the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photographer for his long-term project to map the geography of poverty in the US. As Time LightBox
notes, for the past two decades, Black had been photographing poverty, migration and farming in California’s Central Valley. In early 2014, he turned to Instagram to reach a new audience "and
bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots." Work from the project has recently been on view at the Anastasia Photo gallery in NYC. Read the full Story >>
Anastasia Gallery Wednesday September 10, 2014
Matt Black is an award-winning documentary photographer who grew up in California’s Central Valley, the vast agricultural heart of the
state. In 1995, Black returned to his roots to embark on a series called “The Kingdom of Dust,” a multi-year chronicle exploring the contemporary rural life in the shadow of some of
America's richest farms. While working on that project, he noticed a shift in the population of migrants coming to work the fields, and in 2000 he began another project called “The People of
Clouds,” a photographic inquiry into the collapse of indigenous farming communities in the Mixteca region of southern Mexico. Black captures “the poetry of everyday moments" as he
chronicles communities in flux, notes New York City’s Anastasia Gallery, where both projects are on view. Read the full Story >>
Friday August 14, 2020
Matt Herron, a photojournalist who vividly memorialized the most portentous and promising moments from the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the Deep
South, died on August 7 when a glider he was piloting crashed in Northern California, notes The New York Times. He was 89. A child of the Depression and a protégé of the Dust Bowl
documentarian Dorothea Lange, Herron assembled a team of photographers to capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters, aided by their white Freedom Rider allies. Read the full Story >>
TIME LightBox Tuesday May 6, 2014
“Poverty and place are so closely related that it’s taken for granted, and it’s a mindset that enables the kind of shoddy treatment that poor communities receive,” says
photographer Matt Black, who is using Instagram in an innovative way—to chart the terrain of poverty. “The idea is very documentary,
in the older sense of the word: single photos that record certain conditions,” Black tells Time LightBox. “The project also ties in with the idea of building maps from the bottom
up—critical cartography, it’s called.” Black had been developing his ideas for about a year before he began looking for platforms on which to execute them. “Instagram had
everything I needed,” he says. Read the full Story >>
The Guardian Friday December 17, 2021
The Guardian makes its selections of the best photography books of 2021. On the list: Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia (Taschen), which sees the Amazon “as a black and white heaven, or as a paradise in the process of being lost.” There’s also Matt Black’s American Geography: A Reckoning With a Dream (Thames & Hudson), which The Guardian calls “a tragic atlas, documenting long months on the road in impoverished tracts of the country.” Meanwhile, The Year That Changed Our World (Thames & Hudson) chronicles the pandemic. Read the full Story >>
By
David Schonauer Wednesday October 30, 2024
"If the American poor, numbering about 40 million at the time of this writing, started their own country, they would form the 37th-largest nation in the world, bigger than Canada." So notes Magnum
photographer Matt Black in his forthcoming book, "American Artifacts." Beginning in 2014, Black spent six years traveling over 100,000 miles across 46 states to designated "poverty areas" (places with
a poverty … Read the full Story >>
PDNPULSE Thursday July 2, 2015
A record six photographers—Matt Black, Carolyn Drake, Richard Mosse, Newsha Tavakolian, Lorenzo Meloni and Max Pinckers—have been named nominees of Magnum Photos, reports PDN Pulse. The
cooperative agency also voted to make Michael Christopher Brown, who was named a Magnum nominee in 2013, an associate of the agency. Read the full Story >>
LensCulture Monday May 9, 2016
Last year Magnum accepted a record six photographers as nominees; now LensCulture interviews them as part of its association with the agency. The nominees include Iran-born Newsha Tavokolian;
Belgium-born Max Pinckers; American photographer Carolyn Drake; India-born Sohrab Hura; Italy-born Lorenzo Meloni; and American Matt Black. “Before I ever owned a camera, I knew that there was
something there for me. It is a voice and a certain stance on life that I automatically felt very comfortable with,” he says. Read the full Story >>
Warped Perception Wednesday August 12, 2020
Matt Mikka at Warped Perception had an interesting idea: He put a GoPro Hero 7 Black with an LED light inside a car tire “to see what it looks like inside of a
wheel when we drive around every day.” The camera is in a fixed position, so you don’t see anything spinning, but to some observers the resulting visual looks like a beating heart. Others
are impressed that the GoPro held up to the 35 to 45 PSI inside the tire — the equivalent of being 80 to 100 feet underwater. Read the full Story >>
TIME LightBox Friday December 18, 2015
Time magazine has announced its Instagram photographer of the year — Stacy Kranitz (@stacykranitz), a Kentucky native
who uses Instagram to explore the Appalachian region with intensely personal photographs. She uses Instagram as “it was intended to be used, to witness things as they happen,” says past
winner Matt Black. Kranitz embraces the fact that her presence directly impacts her subjects and her photographs; that’s why she doesn’t shy away from picturing herself among them, notes
Time. Read the full Story >>
The New Yorker Thursday March 21, 2019
Photographer Matt Eich first
visited the small city of Greenwood, Mississippi, while on assignment in 2010. Over the next seven years he returned to the area, where, according to census data, 48 percent of black residents live in
poverty, compared to 11 percent of white residents. In those trips, notes The New Yorker, Eich (see our profile) photographed “football games and funerals, bachelor
parties and baptisms, to create a detailed portrait of life there.” The work is collected in the new book “Sin & Salvation in
Baptist Town.” Read the full Story >>
The Washington Post Monday October 14, 2019
On a grassy backyard about an
hour and a half from the nation’s capital, men gather to settle scores. But not, notes The Washington Post, with guns. Instead, they pummel each other with their fists and feet. Post
photographer Matt McClain documented the grudge matches that take place inside a ring made from a chain-link fence and black-painted plywood. “We
don’t want anyone dying, and we don’t want anyone going to jail,” says Chris Willmore, who created the fight club Streetbeefs in his Harrisonburg, Va., in 2008. Read the full Story >>
W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Friday December 4, 2020
Online now and continuing through December 14 is the first-ever flash print sale supporting the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund’s grants and fellowships for documentary photographers. The Smith Fund has awarded more than $1 million in grants and fellowships since 1979 and this year, despite cancelled fundraising events and a decrease in corporate sponsorships, presented $10,000 grants each to five photographers. The sale features 11x14 prints from photographers including Ami Vitale, Stephanie Sinclair, Matt Black, and Moises Saman. Read the full Story >>
PDNPULSE Tuesday January 27, 2015
The Magnum Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2015 Emergency Fund grants, which, notes PDN Pulse, support the
production of in-depth documentary photography projects “that can no longer be funded through the media alone.” They are: Asim Rafiqui, Curran Hatleberg, Elena Perlino, Emine Gozde Sevim,
Guy Martin, Massimo Berruti, Matt Black, Nii Obodai Provencal, Pete Muller, Peter DiCampo and Peter van Agtmael. Also announced were the seven recipients of the foundation’s Human Rights
Fellowship. Read the full Story >>
The New Yorker Wednesday October 1, 2014
California’s Central Valley, writes Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker, is “the country’s fruit basket, salad bowl, and dairy case.” But since 2012, when the state began suffering
through a historically severe drought, the farmers of the valley have been facing a crisis—one that may come to haunt supermarket shoppers everywhere. Recently, photographer Matt Black, who grew
up in the valley and is exhibiting a photo series about the region at New York’s Anastasia Gallery, collaborated with VII
photographer and filmmaker Ed Kashi on a documentary project about the drought; it’s on view now at the New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog. See also: This series of GIFs showing the severity of the drought. Read the full Story >>
