The title of the exhibition mixes two of the series that Matt Black has been developing for nearly twenty years – precisely since 1995, when he got out of university and settled down in a small town of the Central Valley, where he grew up. One of them focuses on Mexico, in the mountains of Mixteca, that spans over the indigenous regions of Puebla, Oaxaca and Guerrero, and whose name literally means “The Place of the Cloud People”. With the wind of immigration – half forced by the economic constraints, half aroused by the temptation of recent and inviting infrastructures -, indigenous Mexicans are pushed towards north like clouds, over the US borders, to work in the seemingly never-ending fields of California. There, what is awaiting them is far from the expected dream. It’s dust mainly dust – the kingdom of dust, as Matt Black calls it -, at a place where used to shine a lush agriculture.
The dams and canals built during the sumptuous Franklin Roosevelt era and after have turned a no man’s land into the most productive agricultural region. If the water tends to be scarce – this year was the driest ever recorded -, the Central Valley still provides half of the US food production, representing 40 billion dollars. The mass-industrialization of agriculture annihilated any alternative conception of growing food and reduced Mexican traditional family farms to sterile ash. The apocalyptic views of slash and burn farming that Matt Black captured in his grainy black and white photographs look like visions from a distant past. So do the nostalgic scenes of three generations of farmers rounding their back under a bundle of wheat, returning “from ruined land”, as the caption reads. It’s not a coincidence if his photograph of two young sisters emptying their family’s corn crib in San Miguel Cuevas, Mexico, evokes the picture that Dorothea Lange took in 1940, somewhere between Weedpatch and Lamont, Kern County, California, of two children living in a camp.
The history keeps repeating its schemes of social consequences. The Cloud People are the latest wave of working immigration, one that can’t go back to Mexico to harvest their own fields after the picking season in California because crossing the border now costs 4,000 $; one that make less money because the time when unions defended the workers’ rights is over; one that have to struggle to find a job because the environment has been so upset by a counter-nature agriculture that it leaves some fields empty and dust-dry and rips off roofs. It’s an entire set of values that is in question in this ongoing work. Matt Black calls it reporting. I call it engagement.
EXHIBITION
Matt Black: From Clouds to Dust
September 12 – October 19, 2014
Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard Street
NY 10002
USA
