A Magnum Photos member since 2019, Matt Black is one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary documentary photography, recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award and three-time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize. Raised in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural and rural region at the heart of the state, Black’s work has always been attuned to social fault lines, starting from the ‘concentrated poverty’ of his home region.
His most ambitious project, American Geography, is also his most radical in conception: between 2014 and 2020, Black travelled over 100,000 miles across 46 states, documenting an invisible America at the edges of the mainstream narrative. The result is a human atlas of inequality: forgotten communities, faces that speak of exhaustion and resilience, landscapes where the American dream has stalled. Published by Thames & Hudson in 2021, the project made its exhibition debut at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, confirming its international reach.
A guest at Trieste Photo Days and president of the URBAN Photo Awards 2025 jury, where he chaired the Projects & Portfolios commission, Matt Black brings to Trieste a reflection on the very meaning of photography: telling the stories that belong to us, going deeper into the reality that surrounds us, because it is there that images find their reason for being.
