Photographer Matt Black

Freelance photographer Matt Black is a native of rural California, and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, a rich agricultural region that, ironically, is also home to a number of impoverished ethnic communities, among them immigrants from Mexico, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as well as a dwindling population of black sharecroppers that migrated to California during the Dust Bowl era. Since 1998 he has been documenting such communities through the interrelated thematic prisms of migration, agriculture and rural poverty. Inspired by the socially committed photographers of the 1930s, Black specializes in the extended photo essay, spending months, sometimes years photographing a particular place or community. His powerful, dreamlike and unflinching images serve to raise awareness of overlooked and marginalized populations for whom the American Dream is on permanent deferral.

                                     >>>Matt Black