MATT BLACK

THE GEOGRAPHY OF POVERTY

Moderator: Mark Murrmann

ABOUT THE EVENT

`The Geography of Poverty` is an ongoing photographic survey of areas of “concentrated poverty” across the United States, where more than 20% of the population lives below the poverty line.
Since 2015, Black has travelled from the deserts of the Southwest through the black belt in the South, to the post-industrial towns in the Midwest and Northeast, photographing over one hundred communities across 46 U.S. states.
Black has just completed a new journey across America and will present his latest body of work photographed in 2017.

After the presentation moderator Mark Murrann will follow up with an interview and Q&A with the audience.

ABOUT MATT BLACK

Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region in the heart of the state. His work has explored the connections between migration, poverty, agriculture, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico.

Other recent 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 of these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker.

He received the W. Eugene Smith Award for his Geography of Poverty project in 2015. In 2016, he received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. His work has also been honored by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and others. He lives in Exeter, a small town in California’s Central Valley, and is an Associate Member of Magnum Photos.

ABOUT MARK MURRMANN

Mark Murrmann is Photo Editor at Mother Jones magazine where he oversees all photography from the magazine and website. He came to the magazine in 2007, having previously been a freelance photographer, music writer and an editor of the iconic punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll. Mark remains an active photographer who regularly publishes photozines and is a contributor to Hamburger Eyes photozine. Mark studied photojournalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.