Connecticut HQ Art

Matt Black’s photography, while rooted in the documentary tradition, has a deeply personal approach, emotional engagement, and visual intensity.

Grocery Carts is from the series American Geography, created between 2014 and 2020. The artist traveled across 46 states, exploring how poverty affects the economics and social fabric of certain communities. Meticulously planning a route over 100,000 miles that only took him through towns with a poverty rate of more than 20%, he was shocked to find that he could traverse the country without ever crossing above the poverty line.

Black’s work has appeared regularly in U.S. and international publications, including Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Le Monde, and Internazionale. He has been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize on three separate occasions. He received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award in 2015 and was named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective. He has received other grants and awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Society of Publication Designers, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the California Arts Council, and World Press Photo. He was nominated to join the agency Magnum Photos in 2015 and became a member in 2019.