WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
The other humiliation of America
It is not Matt Black’s individual, infinitely sad images that make up the overall picture – it is how widespread their themes of desperation are right across the country’s geography, writes JOHN GREEN
(Left) Burning tires, Corcoran, California, 2014; (right) Alturas, California, 2016
[Matt Black] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Matt Black: American Geography
Magnum Gallery and online 63 London
AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY explores themes of inequality against the backdrop of the American Dream. The exhibition will coincide with the launch of Black’s eponymous book by Thames & Hudson.
For those who wish to know and who are willing to dig beneath the mounds of Hollywood tinsel, the TV soap operas and the US’s own propaganda, it is no secret that the richest country on Earth has not only the greatest gulf between rich and poor but also huge numbers of very poor people, left behind by the American dream.
Even for those reasonably well off, falling into the poverty sink hole is always only a few steps away. Black documents that world the US elite wishes to hide from its own people and the rest of the world.
In 2013, he began photographing isolated communities in California’s Central Valley, the rural, agricultural area where he lives. In 2015, he expanded the project to encompass the United States as a whole and completed his first cross-country trip, a three-and-a-half-month journey visiting dozens of communities across 28 states.
Since then, he has completed four additional trips, travelling over 100,000 miles and making work across 46 states. He discovered that he could cross the country without ever emerging above the poverty line.
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