Matt Black’s photographs look brittle and dry. I can feel the scorching heat, I perceive viscerally earth turned to dust, and I see animals desperate for water and people suffering. His pictures get under my skin.
Black’s pictures tell the story of California’s Central Valley, which is officially in a state of emergency. Last year marked the third straight year of below-average rainfall, and still there is no rain. A sense of fear and desperation is pervasive. Twenty years ago Black made a long-term commitment to document life in the Central Valley and later the ongoing drought. He is uniquely equipped to tell the story of how this agricultural region, “the kingdom of food,” as he calls it, turned into the “kingdom of dust.”
He grew up in Visalia, a small town in the Central Valley, worked for a newspaper when he was young, and returned home after he received his undergraduate degree in U.S. labor history and Latin American history. Working for newspapers taught him how to tell a story visually. Living in the region connected him intimately, and his studies provided him with the historical context. Being a photo reporter, and a good one, is his craft: solid reporting, learning the facts, a familiarity with the terrain and its people, and an in-depth focus on the story are 95 percent of his work.
The remaining five percent is reserved for the pleasure of taking pictures – responding intuitively, acknowledging there is mystery beyond what can be seen, and being in awe of what can’t be controlled and embracing it. His reward is the creation of magical images – when the light is perfect and everything coincides – that reveal him as an artist as well as a craftsman.
Reframing Portraits for the Black Gaze
In two different exhibitions, Mickalene Thomas explores issues of representation and agency in her own work and that of others.
Jon Henry
Jon Henry is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture for his series Stranger Fruit, portraits of Black mothers holding their sons in poses that suggest the pietà.
Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
Black Is Beautiful, the robust Kwame Brathwaite re...
William Christenberry & RaMell Ross: Desire Paths | Pace Gallery, New York City
The title of this exhibition, Desire Paths, on vie...
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
A Retrospective Presents 40 Years of Dawoud Bey's Empathetic Photographs
Like Harlem Redux, Bey’s latest series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, its title a reference to a line in Langston Hughes’s classic poem Dream Variations, applies the photographer’s compassionate sense of looking to a historically charged landscape.
As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic | Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
On view through December 31, As We Rise: Photograp...
Ming Smith's Transcendent Vision
The pioneering photographer gets a long-awaited solo show at MoMA.
Nona Faustine: Time-Traveling Goddess
The Brooklyn-born photographer’s solo show at the Brooklyn Museum provides an entry point into ongoing series that engage with race and the power and resilience of Black women.
Visualizing the Invisible: Edmund Clark and Trevor Paglen
From its inception, the war on terror has been a l...
Liz Johnson Artur
Diane Arbus famously remarked that making a p...
Zora J Murff
Zora J Murff’s series At No Point in Between is a slow burn of a project. Based in the historically Black neighborhood of North Omaha, Nebraska, his portraits, landscape images, and found photographs build upon each other to form a quietly devastating indictment of the multiple ways that violence is inflicted on Black communities.