Matt Black

Matt Black is from 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, he traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 states for his book American Geography, published by Thames and Hudson in 2021, accompanied by a traveling exhibition that opened at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. 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.

Other works include The Dry Land, about the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, about the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker.

His work has appeared regularly in the US and international press, including TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, Le Monde and Internazionale. He has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, and has held fellowships from the Emerson Collective, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the National Geographic Society. He is a member of the Magnum Photos agency.