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The other humiliation of America
It is not Matt Black’s individual, infinitely sad images that make up the overall picture – it is how widespread their themes of desperation are right across the country’s geography, writes JOHN GREEN
(Left) Burning tires, Corcoran, California, 2014; (right) Alturas, California, 2016
[Matt Black]
DENNIS BROE searches the literary canon to explore why a duplicitous, lying, cheating, conning US businessman is accepted as Scammer-in-Chief
MIK SABIERS raises a glass of Lambrini to commentary, diatribes, punk rock riffs, some pontification and a whole lot of fun
BRENT CUTLER unpicks the complex social relations imagined in a novel about the builders of Stonehenge
SUSAN DARLINGTON laments a version of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes that is unable to solve its own problems
New releases from The Thumping Tommys, Dan O’Farrell and The Difference Engine, and Sean Taylor
Matt Black: American Geography
Magnum Gallery and online 63 London
AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY explores themes of inequality against the backdrop of the American Dream. The exhibition will coincide with the launch of Black’s eponymous book by Thames & Hudson.
For those who wish to know and who are willing to dig beneath the mounds of Hollywood tinsel, the TV soap operas and the US’s own propaganda, it is no secret that the richest country on Earth has not only the greatest gulf between rich and poor but also huge numbers of very poor people, left behind by the American dream.
Even for those reasonably well off, falling into the poverty sink hole is always only a few steps away. Black documents that world the US elite wishes to hide from its own people and the rest of the world.
In 2013, he began photographing isolated communities in California’s Central Valley, the rural, agricultural area where he lives. In 2015, he expanded the project to encompass the United States as a whole and completed his first cross-country trip, a three-and-a-half-month journey visiting dozens of communities across 28 states.
Since then, he has completed four additional trips, travelling over 100,000 miles and making work across 46 states. He discovered that he could cross the country without ever emerging above the poverty line.
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