Photographer Matt Black has spent three decades documenting farmworkers and their families living below the poverty line in the agricultural Central Valley, drawing attention to the extreme economic inequality in California’s heartland.
Yet when Black, a member of the renowned photo agency Magnum and one of the most respected social documentarians of his generation, hears the word “marginalized” being used to describe people and places he knows well, he recoils.
“I know the feeling, that sense of shame, of being told from the outside that where you come from doesn’t matter,” Black says.
The Central Valley—a broad swath of fertile land smoothed between the Coast Ranges to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east—has been a source of enduring pride and an artistic anchor for lifelong resident Black. Earlier in his career, however, he had to fight to have his photographs taken seriously and recognized for their universality, not just their emotional acuity. Eventually, his deeply reported photo projects on poverty, drought, labor, and the migration crisis appeared in such publications as the New Yorker (“The Dry Land,” 2014; “The Monster in the Mountains,” 2015), Time (“States of Vulnerability,” 2018), and the California Sunday Magazine (“Papá, I Don’t Think You Should Go to Work Today,” 2018).
“Occasionally, with my work in the Central Valley, I get the feeling that people can dismiss it by saying that it’s happening in some weird place in the in 2015. “But I know very well that the Central Valley is not an outlier. You can find similar communities and similar circumstances throughout the country.”
