Matt Black Wins 2025 MacArthur Fellowship
Black has been selected for the prestigious award given to "extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential"
Matt Black has been named one of the 22 recipients of the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The Fellowship is given to “extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions,” writes the Foundation, which has awarded the no-strings-attached grants since 1981.
Black lives in California’s Central Valley, where much of his work is focused. For three decades, he has been documenting the lives and landscapes in marginalized communities across the United States as well as in Mexico.
“Anyone that’s from a place that’s not mainstream, you feel that very profoundly. That’s shaped my point of view about the role that my work can play in pushing back against those surface-level clichés about how we frame what America is,” he says in acceptance of the MacArthur Fellowship.
"We have all these mythologies that we've told ourselves about what America is"
- Matt Black
From 2012-2015, Black photographed Monster in the Mountains, a series on the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. His 2014 project The Dry Land investigated the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities.
From 2014-2020, he took a 100,000-mile journey across the United States, probing the economic and political injustices that have enabled cycles of poverty and environmental distress. Visiting places where 20 percent or more of the population lives below the poverty line, Black lays bare the rift between America’s proclaimed ideals and its realities, exploring poverty as a deep-seated feature of the nation’s geopolitics.
“My photography is based on these reactions that I have to the profound inequality that we have in this place that we still think of as the land of opportunity. We have all these mythologies that we’ve told ourselves about what America is,” Black says.
His project became the photobook American Geography, which was one of Time magazine’s top photography books in 2021.
“What was at the core of the story was […] how intertwined these economic structures or these sources of inequality are in America and have been for a very long time,” he says. In 2024, he published a companion volume titled American Artifacts, compiling images of artifacts from the towns he visited.
The intersection between environmental crises, shifting landscapes and vulnerable geographies in arid regions continues to be a central theme of Black’s work. “Giga-fires, mega-droughts, and thousand-year floods are reshaping the American West,” Black writes. “From my home, I have seen massive Sierra wildfires fill the sky with smoke, and over 500,000 acres of farmland fall fallow for lack of water.”
In America’s Great Basin, a 200,000 square mile inner watershed, Black has portrayed the struggles between protecting land-dependent livelihoods and conserving natural habitats. Using a thermal camera, he exposes the imprints that human activity and rising temperatures have on the landscape. His images were recently featured in his solo exhibition at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.
Black has also documented water inequality and intensified droughts in America in recent years, which has hit agricultural communities the hardest, particularly in California. “The topic of water forced itself on me just by virtue of where I live and where I’m from,” says Black.
“I want to stand up for this place and places like this. People here are continually getting short shrift. With all the changes being brought on environmentally, the most vulnerable people and the most vulnerable communities are feeling the brunt of that, and it’s not just kind of on the margins – it’s right in the center of everything.”
“Photography necessarily does end up being this deeply human affirmation of life, even the difficult parts. It’s a way of trying to reckon with those difficult parts and a way of trying to make sense of the world that’s profoundly human,” Black says in the trailer for his online course at Magnum, titled “The Documentary Commitment.”
