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The days of our years are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow.
-- Psalm 90:10
Former construction worker at a homeless camp, Fresno, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Woman at her shantytown home, Fresno, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
A stranded migrant in his shanty, Fresno, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
A couple outside their shanty, Fresno, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Hunting for recyclables, Mendota, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Jobless man at his shantytown home, Fresno, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Homeless men at an irrigation canal, Mendota, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
An idled farmworker's makeshift home, Mendota, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Jobless man bathes in a ditch, Mendota, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Boy with an old farm truck, Teviston, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Former cotton migrant at home, Teviston, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
Ex-farmworker in his yard, Teviston, California: photo by Matt Black, 2011 (Matt Black Photography)
In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, few areas suffered more than California's Central Valley, where recession and a three-year drought combined into a perfect storm of hardship. In some communities, unemployment rose past 40% and more than 40 homes a day were lost to foreclosure. Thousands of acres of farmland sat idle for lack of water, and dust storms brewed where tomatoes and cotton once grew. As the crisis deepened, hunger and homelessness boomed, resulting in a depth of poverty unseen in California since the days of the Dust Bowl.
Rising from the remnants of what was once a vast inland sea, [the] Central Valley is an agricultural empire unparalleled in the history of the world. Covering an area larger than ten US states, it is home to America's richest farms and generates close to $20 billion dollars' worth of fresh food each year, nearly half of the US supply.
Though this wealth comes from the earth, there is little natural about how it is produced: the Central Valley is a place not so much rural as it is empty-urban -- a thoroughly industrialized farm landscape whose once undulating plains have been tractored into table-top flatness, whose streams have been dammed and whose lakes have been drained. Some farms have become so automated that the tractors are piloted by satellite, and some plots are so vast and monotonous that thousands of pollinating bees die each year because they can't find their way back to their hives. So much water has been pumped from the aquifers that in places the ground has dropped by fifty feet. Most tellingly, the fields are planted, tended and harvested by migrants brought in by the busload: few make more than $10,000 per year, eight out of ten are undocumented, and hardly any know the names of the farmers in whose fields they work.
From the roots of this unnatural wealth has sprung a dysfunctional society, communities whose chronically high unemployment and generational poverty have fostered social ills more commonly associated with big cities. In tiny towns surrounded by farm fields, drug and alcohol addiction is rampant, teenage pregnancies are among the highest in the nation, crime and gangs are commonplace.
Much is revealed by how a society raises its food -- the one thing people both pay for and pray over -- and the Central Valley tells us much about modern life. A modern rural distopia, it is a landscape at once rich but impoverished, industrialized but rural, inhabited but unsettled: a kingdom, but one made of dust, nourishing millions as it consumes itself.
10 comments:
Wow, this is really creepy. It just makes my head spin. I am addicted to reading Grist, the green environmental web-zine that covers a lot of our bad farming practices, and more, but you would think at a certain point, we would wake up, or start to?
And I can't speak for my daughter, who has been involved in relief work in different countries, but she talks about how certain NGOs dump our cheap food into places that might not need it which undercuts the farming there . . . Again, I can't speak for her, and should not try, but let me just say that the cycling and recycling of poverty and abuse around the globe is mind-boggling.
My head is spinning also from the images and others I viewed on Matt Black's website. Why aren't these better known? I suppose because they're too difficult to look at; impossible to disregard once you've seen them. It was good reading through the psalm. Curtis
These are the riches of the man.
These pictures have a graveyard stillness to them.
even birds
make their nests...
beggars under the bridge
- Issa
That we, now, should need someone who looks and shows as unblinkingly as Dorothea Lange did - the disgrace there is in that.
Ditto Barry. Curtis
Tom,
Matt Black, starring in "Son of The Grapes of Wrath": "The days of our years are threescore and ten . . . yet is their strength labour and sorrow. "
10.27
light coming into cloud above blackness
of ridge, first bird chirping on branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
listening to this there, as
something that simply
is there, to see it in part,
in some sense the end
silver of sunlight reflected in channel,
shadowed green slope of ridge across it
That we should so badly need this documentary record; that it should so make our heads spin and be so painful to view and feel so expressive of an ingrained despair; that the photographer is not better known in art world circles -- these facts all all seem to fit together, making a terrible kind of "common sense".
The great national treasure of the FSA photo archives of the last Depression were (and remain) in many ways difficult to look at, for much the same reason; and those too went largely overlooked in their time (not to mention later), apart from a few "iconic" photos that have survived in general circulation as markers of the epoch.
For me, Matt Black's photos are historic markers of much the same kind. But unlike the FSA photographers, he was not a visitor from another part of the land, investigating on assignment. This country is clearly his own. Were he not of the place, it is hard to imagine how he could have gained these privileged vantages.
Those of you who have mentioned Dorothea Lange -- who, of course, as a visitor, some 75 years earlier, had discovered a great deal in this same region, not least, her vocation as an artist -- have anticipated where this series of posts was headed. Thanks for the close attention.
All these photos break my heart, but esp #5, #7 and the last three... the third-from-last, that shadowy fragment of pickup-truck hood as the beak of some dark bird, either speaking to or, perhaps, issuing some strange spell into, the thirsty mouth of that boy.
Unforgettable.
so very reminiscent of the Dust Bowl, the Depression and WPA photos- intensly personal images. Bravo.
Thanks, Kathe. By the way, please note: it appears the teacher who has assigned this post as a "writing prompt" is not very good at reading.
The title, text, captions and attribution make it plain that the photographer is not me (as your teacher has for some reason erroneously suggested on her blog) but the great Matt Black.
Getting that wrong is a grievous error on your teacher's part. I'd strongly suggest you let her know that in the profession she has chosen, as in most others, haste makes waste, and getting the details straight is the name of the game.
Authorship is perhaps the most important of the details. Misrepresentations on that point do a disservice to everyone involved.
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