FUTURES: Learn with Magnum Photos | Matt Black
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Join us on Tuesday 6 May for an online presentation by Matt Black of his long term project American Geography.
Between 2014 and 2020, Matt Black traveled from his hometown in California's Central Valley to hundreds of other communities across the United States. Concentrating on cities, towns, and counties with poverty rates above 20%, he discovered that he could travel from coast to coast without ever crossing above the poverty line. His exploration of this stark American reality grew to cover over 100,000 miles and 46 states, spread across five cross-country trips.
In a 2016 article titled “Economic growth in the United States: A tale of two countries,” economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman state, “Our data show that the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s. It’s a tale of two countries. For the 117 million U.S. adults in the bottom half of the income distribution, growth has been non-existent for a generation while at the top of the ladder it has been extraordinarily strong.” With his project American Geography, Matt Black chose to focus on one of these two countries. For six years, starting in 2014, traveling by bus and by car across the US, he explored “the geography of poverty” – photographing an America and American lives that to him were the rule, not the exception.
A photobook was published by Thames & Hudson in 2021.
The FUTURES: Learn with Magnum Photos program is designed to help FUTURES artists address challenges in their photography careers, inspire creativity, and build a sense of community. The success of this program relies heavily on your participation. We encourage you to register for the sessions, stay fully engaged, keep your video on, and actively participate with questions and comments. We are working to make the program more interactive, aiming to overcome the limitations of online meetings, and we are confident that together, we can create something meaningful and valuable.
Curated exclusively for FUTURES artists.