There are many ways the Anthropocene Alliance (A2) has helped LEAD Agency through the years. Our first gift arrived in a phone call when their founder Harriet Festing called to ask if we had any need for a billboard, and if so A2 would assist in covering part of that cost. You all may recall seeing it on Main Street for over a year, declaring to a former senator, now deceased, “we didn’t elect you to flood us.”
This fall, Ms. Festing sent a photographer to find the images that would depict some of the environmental and health impacts mining can do to a place and her people.
Matt Black walked into the LEAD Agency office through the back door. He began first by seeing art works but clearly focused on the black and white poster we have framed of Caesar Chavez on the wall. It took almost a week before he spoke to me about that image. He went unassigned to photograph Chávez when he had been an 18-year-old rookie reporter/photographer. The fasting Caesar Chavez was 36 days into a hunger strike for rights for the farm workers he represented in California. And while Matt waited with many other media representatives, who were all ready to be there for the end, either of his life from the self-starvation, or for the moment he broke the fast.
I am not sure how long they waited, but they were not alone in the room. With them were many well-known celebrities and political figures at that time, all supporters of the efforts Chavez were attempting to provide through this action for the farmer workers.
The moment came and the sustenance that broke the fast was the focus of all the other media in the room. But what Matt Black did that changed his life probably forever was to see much more in that moment. He widened his lens to take in all the supporting cast in the room watching that offering. He saw who else was in the room. Ethel Kennedy and children, Jessie Jackson and others. This photo and meeting another influential photographer there changed and put Matt on a path of the career he has been following since that time.
His talent was revealed. He is able to not necessarily see the crime or the beauty but see and allow the viewer of these images to see deeply into a place. Hardship and actually to see reality in ways his images reveal perhaps decades later.
Images that remain in your mind like the one of that intimate moment when that fast for the justice for farm workers ended.
There is a seriousness of this place you may not feel. You’ve lived it and lived with it your whole life.
But a photographer as Matt Black with character and calm respect coming here can see us and know our history and by doing this will provide a standing in the world for the world to see us.
This site will be a third prong of a story he will tell and will show the world how mining impacts lives long after the digging and drilling is over.
Matt Black is a full member of Magnum Photos and a native of California’s Central Valley. His homeland, the agricultural farm fields of that Central Valley became his focus in the late 1980’s. He had a desire to see America’s social tragedies while using the themes of geography, inequality and the environment. He went looking for how injustice in America is manifested. Through his time with his subjects, seeing where and how they fit into a place, he has used his talent to “crystalize thought and emotion and to motivate people to think and connect with each other.”
“I would never make an image that I felt was going to harm somebody,” Matt has been quoted to have said. After meeting him, we will have all felt his intentions both visually as well as spiritually are true. His photographs stem from the enduring legacy of the Great Depression and now he will be adding ours to his legacy.
It was fitting his visit dovetailed into the Miami Public Library’s Big Read book: The Grapes of Wrath. The images from that time period and the way I envisioned John Steinbeck’s time with our Okie relatives in California made Matt Black more like a time-traveler from California back to Oklahoma. I had him on my mind during the “Where We Live” Creative Writing Workshop they had scheduled me to give to explore the environmental impacts that have shaped our lives in Ottawa County. Bill Honker, a former EPA official wrote in a song, “a few may profit from the mines, but many pay the debt,” and with Matt’s artistry we may all be able to see what that may look like.
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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