Thames & Hudson
Review by David Starkey
In 2021, photographer Matt Black published American Geography, a record of his 100,000 mile, 46-state journey to more than 1,200 of the most desperate communities in America, places where the poverty rate exceeds 20%. The book was full of people living hand-to-mouth in spectacularly ugly places—a world of leaky roofs and broken mailboxes, trash-strewn lots and long shadows on mostly empty streets. Black also included entries from his own travelogue, as well as snatches of commentary from people he met. It was a devastating portrait of those the rest of us have left behind.
In American Artifacts, Black shifts his focus from people and places to the things he found on his odyssey, including lottery tickets and matchbooks, job applications and broken tools. By the end of his travels, he had “accumulated over 3.000 of these objects, labeled, annotated, and boxed.” In his home studio, he “photographed each of them under the bright light of a flash.”
The result is a collection of stunning black and white images, a photographic record of things no one wants anymore. To wit: A Master lock with a broken shackle. A lone running shoe half-buried in a dusty road. A discarded crutch. A comb with most of its teeth missing. A rusted safety pin. A pair of eyeglasses with only one lens.
A number of pages are covered with depictions of a single object: torn and dirty work gloves, plastic utensils, empty cigarette packages (for the record, Marlboro is king), empty liquor bottles. One particularly poignant spread shows discarded cardboard signs asking for assistance: “Can u Help | ALittel Gos | A Long ways | GoD BLESS.” Then there are pages of discarded wires: mostly misshapen coat hangers, but plenty of stray bits of metal that, taken together and arranged just so, create something beautiful.
Several four-page foldouts, three feet in length, recall the images in American Geography: a filthy mattress in the middle of an alley, a lone horse standing in field of desert junk, a mobile home looking out on an abandoned diner. And, again, Black includes brief quotes from unnamed sources, along with entries in his travel journal and extended statements from people living in poverty. In each case, the person speaking to us is in dire need of both money and dignity. As one Kentucky grandmother who can only afford to buy groceries or have her water turned back on, not both, laments: “I don’t want [my grandson] worrying that Mawmaw can’t pay the bills.”
Sure, there’s more than a touch of irony in the fact that the work is presented in a lavish, fairly expensive art book, but I found the contrast between the images and their container only emphasized the poignancy of the photographs. Black’s “sidewalk archeology” excavates the leavings of a society that treats its poorest citizens with criminal disdain, and this elegant volume insists on the importance of digging into the misery we too easily turn away from and giving voice to the voiceless. In the words of one anonymous person Black met on his journey: “What exactly do they mean by ‘promised land’?”
