Magnum photographer exhibit premieres at the VisCom Gallery

American Geography exhibit by Matt Black

Magnum lensman Matt Black will debut his pop-up exhibit titled “American Geography” in the Ohio University School of Visual Communication Gallery, Schoonover Center 140, from Feb. 23 to March 18, 2022.

Black’s work contains a six-year epic journey around the United States, documenting the rural, desolate landscape and the lives of underprivileged Americans.

Between 2014 and 2020, Black traveled from his hometown in California's Central Valley to hundreds of other communities of high poverty across the United States. Concentrating on cities, towns, and counties with poverty rates above 20 percent, he discovered that he could travel from coast to coast without ever crossing above the poverty line. His exploration of this stark American reality grew to cover over 100,000 miles and 46 states, spread across five cross-country trips.

“We’ve bought into the ideology of these presumptions—land of opportunity—that are completely not true but are still so widely accepted. It all comes from that. It all comes from the idea of poverty in America being seen as a personal failure, rather than as a systemic issue,” says Black in an article from Time magazine.

The images in the show are part of the “American Geography” monograph containing a selection of black-and-white prints from Black’s book “American Geography: A Reckoning with a Dream” that can be set up and transformed into a pop-up display. The exhibition also contains an accompanying video travelogue produced and narrated by the photographer.

You can also catch Black virtually and join the conversation hosted by the National Press Photographer’s Association - Ohio University chapter on Feb. 28. (See details below).

Born in 1970, Black grew up in California’s Central Valley, a rural, agricultural area in the heart of the state. In 2015, he was nominated to Magnum Photos. His work has appeared regularly in Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The California Sunday Magazine, and other publications. He has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize. He was also the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award for Humanistic Photography and was named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective.

Photo Exhibit

Feb. 23 to March 18, 2022
The School of Visual Communication Gallery
Schoonover Center 140, Ohio University
Gallery hours: 8 am to 5 pm, Monday-Friday.
Free admission
Masks required