American Geography Book (signed)
After years of photographing in his native rural Central Valley of California, photographer Matt Black wondered, “Just how many other places like mine are there in America?” While the Valley grows nearly half of the nation’s food, close to one-third of its population live in poverty. In 2014, Black began photographing the Valley’s poorest communities, and the following year, he expanded the project to encompass the entire United States. Traveling across 46 states and Puerto Rico, Black visited thousands of high-poverty areas that, while woven through the fabric of the country, are excluded from “the land of opportunity.” American Geography is the visual record of his six-year, 100,000-mile journey chronicling the conditions and experience of those cut off from the American Dream.
ITEM Description:
In one hardcover volume encompassing Black’s entire journey, the images in American Geography begin and end in Black’s home region of the Central Valley of California and take the viewer on a counterclockwise journey around the United States. Divided into four chapters, the images are accompanied by Black’s own travelogue and still-lifes of the hundreds of found objects collected on his travels. Printed in duotone on extra-heavy paper with black embossed cloth cover.
• 105 duotone plates
• 169 pages
• 10” x 10 5/8”
• Hardcover
• Published by Thames & Hudson 2021
• ISBN: 978-0-500-54535-5
• Signed
Reviews:
A deafening boom that lays bare the harsh reality of inequality in America.
— TIME Magazine (one of the Best Photobooks of 2021)
American Geography: A Reckoning With a Dream is a tragic atlas, documenting long months on the road in impoverished tracts of the country. If the sun shines, it glints from junked liquor bottles, and the music that accompanies Black’s halting progress is made by the squeaking of plastic seats in a Greyhound bus. Yet the photographs confer a stoical dignity on these exiles from America’s glossy promise.
– The Guardian (one of the Best Photobooks of 2021)
The disconcerting reality that Black's compassionate yet sober eye reveals may be too uncomfortable for the casual viewer. Yet the images contained within American Geography and the subtle way these images are edited commands our attention and tells a story that demands to be seen.
— PhotoBook Journal
Visceral… Like [Robert] Frank's 'The Americans,' Black's contrasty, chiaoscuro photographs and travelogue reveal the hard truths: the United States in the 21st Century remains a country deeply divided and astonishingly poor… Black, like other committed photographers before him, is revealing to us who we are as Americans. It is up to us now to see.
— Art Photo Collector
The photographs presented here by Black provide the same tenderness [as Lange and Evans]: carefully selected work that narrowly threads the needle. He gestures, never points. He empathizes, but does not pity. The photographs are remarkable… a lovely body of work.
— New York Journal of Books
The images are so vivid and riveting that you can't help but be drawn to them and the questions they ask… An essential document for our increasingly unsteady times.
— The Washington Post
These unforgettable photos of poverty challenge the idea of the American Dream… they call to mind the work of earlier documentarians who looked critically at American society, such as Robert Frank. Black wants the viewer to realize that this is what the details of inequality look like on the ground, and that it is the norm, not the exception, for a large swath of citizens.
— Buzzfeed News
As Black planned out his first trip across the country, he was looking to go to places that had been overlooked. He wanted to explore how poverty affected not just the economics of a place, but the social fabric of the people who lived in those areas. So he began looking for places that had a 20% poverty rate in order to create a map that he could follow as he traveled. But as he researched those places that fit the criteria, and plotted them on his map, he was shocked by what he found: it would be possible to cross the country without ever crossing above the poverty line.
The complete book, which is broken into four sections for the South and West, South and East, North and East, and North and West, is an overwhelming chronicle of poverty in America, and the lives of those living outside of the American Dream.
– Blind Magazine
A resident of California’s Central Valley, Black makes stark, black and white images of those living in our nation’s poorest areas. As with his powerful photos – often of lone figures on dirty streets – Black’s written notebook entries offer simple, moving descriptions of the individuals he meets on his travels — a pregnant woman living in a camper who hasn’t eaten in four days, a farmer losing his family’s farm to foreclosure, a man collecting recyclables in the cold, the wheels of his cart frozen solid.
– Orange County Register
In stark B&W photos, Black’s work, interspersed with his own travelogue, shows the extent of people left behind in the 'land of opportunity.' [...] Like a modern-day Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, Black catalogs the extent of “the psychological and physical pains and indignities of living poor in the richest country in the world.”
-- PopPhoto
