America: Land of Opportunity - by TIME
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Americans cherish the notion of their country as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can “pick yourself up by the bootstraps, all those sorts of things,” says photographer Matt Black. He absorbed them along with everyone else growing up in California’s Central Valley. But taking pictures for a local newspaper meant recording a reality that challenged “these mythologies that this country is built on.” Black wondered: “How many other places like this are there in America? It was this kind of base question gnawing at me for many years: Just go see. Go see from this kind of ground level perspective what the country actually looks like.” Starting in 2014, Black spent six years circumnavigating the Lower 48. To plan his route, he sat down with a map and the U.S. Census “and just started making dots.” The idea was to see if he could traverse the nation and return home without climbing above the poverty line, writes Karl Vick. He found that he could, by allowing just two hours’ driving time between dots. “Which blew my mind, honestly,” Black recalls. “It felt like a discovery. It’s something I’d never seen done before, or thought of before, so even before I started traveling I felt like something really significant had been revealed.”
Read more about Black’s work in his new book, “American Geography.”
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