It is the richest state in the richest country on Earth. And yet, says California native, Matt Black, you have people who don’t have running water in their homes. He tells Colin Pantall why he feels obliged to speak up.
Matt Black
"Photography has the ability to crystallize thought and emotion, and to motivate people to engage with the world. No other medium can match its strength. "
- Matt Black
Matt Black was born in 1970 and lives in California’s Central Valley, a rural, agricultural area in the heart of the state. His work has focused on themes of geography, inequality and the environment in his native region and in related places.
Between 2014 and 2020, Black traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 states for his project American Geography, named as one of Time magazine’s top photography books in 2021. In 2024, he published a companion volume titled American Artifacts, which presents a deeper view of his six-year odyssey documenting poverty in the United States.
His work has appeared regularly in Time, the New Yorker, The California Sunday Magazine, and other publications. He has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, including their top honor for journalism. He has received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and was named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective. He was nominated to Magnum Photos in 2015, and became a full member in 2019.
