Matt Black:

The Documentary Commitment

4. The Central Valley

Contents Photographing Home: The Central Valley

Individual Chapters of a Larger Story

5

14

Homage to an Outlaw 16

City of Exiles 21

The Black Okies 25

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 2

 Sheep in melon field.
Firebaugh, California.
USA. 1995.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 3

 “I think we’re all kind of inevitably
shaped by the places we come from.
The environments we grow up in, and
that’s just something that’s part of the
human experience.”

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 4

Photographing Home: “Growing up in a place like this is to grow up with a feeling that
everything that’s important is somewhere else. It’s not where you
are. And here in California, it’s even more profound, because when

The Central Valley you turn on the TV... You see the beaches of California. You see the
Golden Gate Bridge. But that is not part of your world... Your world
is not the one that’s on TV.”

Matt Black is from the Central Valley: a rural, agricultural region in

the heart of the state of California. The area is known for being one
of the most productive farming regions in the world, including the
production of more than 250 different crops; $40-billion worth of
produce grown annually and 40 percent of the country’s fruit, nuts,
and “table foods” each year. The region is also home to 11 million
immigrants, many of whom have travelled to the Central Valley in
order to work in the agricultural fields.

Over more than 20 years, Black has documented the sociological and
economic landscape of his home territory through photography, and
in this lesson Black describes how this place - his home - is at the
very heart of much of his work.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 5

 Black recounts how, as a young man, all he wanted to do was to leave
his hometown, armed with a feeling “that everything that’s important
is somewhere else”. It was not until leaving for university that he
discovered he was yearning for a more personal connection to the
subjects he photographed, to use photography as a voice for the things
that mattered most to him. Returning home, he began covering
stories on migrant groups, poverty, drought and poor working
conditions that pervaded the Central Valley, with an aim to show
another side to California than the one which was being represented
in the media.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 6

Watering a tomato field.
Huron, California. USA. 2010.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 7

 Tomato harvest. Firebaugh,
California. USA. 2014.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 8

 A man whose well went dry.
Farmersville, California.
USA. 2014.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 9

Fallowed tomato fields.
Corcoran, California.
USA. 2014.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 10

 A mother embraces her son.
Mendota. California.
USA. 2009.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 11

A marcher protests farm Water protesters stopped by
water cuts. Mendota, a security guard. Mendota,
California. 2009. California. USA. 2009.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 12

 A sheep shearer works in a
dry field. Huron, California.
USA. 2010.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 13

Individual Chapters of a Much of Black’s work in the Central Valley is the accumulation of
individual stories on the many different migrant groups that have
called the area home throughout history. He explains that these

Larger Story separate chapters “add up to something larger”, thinking of his

work as “one continuous photo essay”. Black encourages you to also
consider working in this way, so that you may build a more nuanced
representation of your subject matter and maintain direction on long-
term projects.

On the following pages we share a selection of these stories.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 14

 “I would really encourage
photographers to work like that,
because there’s something about that
rhythm of completion and starting
something new. But when they’re
all connected, it leads you in a
certain direction.”

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 15

 Homage to an Outlaw
In Homage to an Outlaw, Black chronicles an annual
event held in Arroyo de Cantua, in memory of
Joaquin Murieta: a famous outlaw who is thought
of as a Robin Hood style figure to the local Mexican
farmworker community.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 16

 Tearsheet. Homage to an
Outlaw. West Magazine.
January 7, 1996.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 17

 Tearsheet. Homage to an
Outlaw. West Magazine.
January 7, 1996.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 18

Tearsheet. Homage to an
Outlaw. West Magazine.
January 7, 1996.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 19

Tearsheet. Homage to an
Outlaw. West Magazine.
January 7, 1996.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 20

 City of Exiles
City of Exiles documents the Armenian Community
of Fresno and their relationship to the novelist
and playwright William Saroyan. A Fresno native,
he wrote extensively about life as an Armenian
immigrant in California.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 21

 Tearsheet. City of Exiles. Los Angeles Times
Magazine. November 22, 1998.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 22

 Tearsheet. City of Exiles. Los Angeles Times
Magazine. November 22, 1998.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 23

Tearsheet. City of Exiles. Los
Angeles Times Magazine.
November 22, 1998.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 24

The Black Okies The Black Okies charts the untold history of the black cotton migrants
who came to California’s Central Valley during the Great Depression.
Unlike their white counterparts, whose migration was chronicled
in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and captured by the Farm
Security Administration photographers, the story of these migrants
had gone largely unreported. Black speaks of how he felt compelled to
document this community and their forgotten chapter of history, at a
time when the last original migrants were still alive.

“If I had been maybe 10 years later, 15 years later, that story would’ve
been impossible to tell because it was really the last little pockets of
this migration that were still alive. And I was able to photograph
the original migrants, children, grandchildren, in these disappearing
communities that today, if you go there, they’re basically gone.”

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 25

 Parishioners at the House of
Prayer. Teviston, California.
USA. 2001.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 26

Weeding cotton. Allensworth, Parishioner awaits Sunday
California. 2001. school. Teviston, California.
USA. 2001.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 27

 Former cotton migrant at
home. Teviston, California.
USA. 2001.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 28

Boy with an old farm truck. Playing on clothesline.
Teviston, California. Teviston, California.
USA. 2001. USA. 2000.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 29

Ninety-six-year-old in his
bedroom. Teviston, California.
USA. 1999.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment – Home 30

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