Background
Black grew up in the town of Visalia, California, in the state"s agricultural Central Valley.
Black grew up in the town of Visalia, California, in the state"s agricultural Central Valley.
While attending high school, he worked as a photographer at the Tulare Advance-Register, later the Visalia Times-Delta, where he learned the black and white photojournalism style he has used throughout his career. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American History from San Francisco State University in 1995. His 1996 article, "Homage to an Outlaw", published by West Magazine, marked the beginning of his long form photojournalism focusing on rural life in the Central Valley.
In 1999, while working on a story about widespread unemployment in the Central Valley in the aftermath of a citrus freeze, Black met a family from Oaxaca, Mexico, which introduced him to the story of indigenous Mixtec migrants.
The following year, he traveled to the Mixteca region of southern Mexico, beginning his project The People of Clouds. Again working in the extended photo-essay form, major stories from this project include The Face of the Mountain, After the Fall and The Monster in the Mountains.
In 2014, he began the project The Geography of Poverty, combining geotagged photographs with census data to map and document poor communities. In the summer of 2015, he completed a thirty-state trip photographing seventy of America’s poorest places.
In addition to still photography, Black has completed several short documentary films, including After the Fall, Harvest of Shadows, California Paradise Burning and The Monster in the Mountains.
1994: World Press Photo Award from World Press Photo, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 2007: Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism from Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. 2014: Time"s Instagram Photographer of the Year 2014. 2015: W. Eugene Smith Grant from the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund.
He is a nominee member of Magnum Photos. In June 2015 he became a nominee member of Magnum Photos.
