Poverty and vanity: the American Outback in pictures by Matt Black

Photographer Matt Black has been working as a photojournalist throughout his life. He takes pictures of small US cities, remote from megacities, with their problems — lack of work, poverty, alcohol.

"Fixing the geography of poverty" - this is how Matt Black defined his work. Migration, poverty, agriculture and the environment are the main topics in the work of this documentary photographer. 

Most often, he directs his lens towards provincial California and to the south of Mexico. But Black also traveled more than 160,900 kilometers across 46 US states, taking pictures for his project "Geography of Poverty". He accompanied the shots with statistical data on the number of people in a particular locality and the number of people living below the poverty line.

Black is a member of the Magnum Agency. This gives him the opportunity to tell his stories to a large number of people. These stories make you feel a completely different life, but also happening on Earth.

The author's photographs to some extent resemble Italian neorealism in the cinema — the bare life of low-income people, monochrome moods.

Far from San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major cities of the state, there are small and poor places. Photographer Matt Black visited them, photographing everything that catches the eye. 

Matt received grants and scholarships from the Robert Kennedy Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the California Arts Council, Pictures of the Year International, the Alexia Foundation, the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, he also became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded by the World Press Photo jury.

Matt also shot a project dedicated to the Mixteca region in Mexico — the strongest soil erosion has dried up not only the land, but also the faces of the residents — they are exhausted from the destruction of houses. People are literally losing ground under their feet.