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An Epic Journey Through U.S. Poverty (Photos)

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On January 8, 1964, Lyndon Johnson, who just over a month before taking over from John F. Kennedy at the White House, launched one of the most ambitious programs a US president has ever proposed: the “war on poverty” , a series of laws to help tens of millions of poor people through subsidies, investments in schools, the creation of a welfare system and more. He made the announcement from the porch of a house in Inez, Kentucky, where Tom Fletcher, an unemployed worker, lived with his wife and their eight children. “Our goal is a landslide victory,” Johnson said.

Fifty-five years later photographer Matt Black went to Inez and visited the same house. Today a man named Harold lives there: “Apart from the orange paint, the building is the same as it appears in the photographs of that day: concrete steps, tin roof, curtains pinned to the windows, the barometer next to the entrance. On the boarded-up porch are two deck chairs and an old sofa, along with a folding table with three packs of cigars, two buckets (one full of cans and the other half-filled) and a stack of firewood. Inside the linoleum that lines the floor is rising and is reattached at the corners with thumbtacks. Harold sits on the porch, wearing black jeans, a blue T-shirt and hiking shoes. Of Johnson he says: ‘He lied to us, just like everyone else’ ”.

In 2015 Black began a journey that over the next five years would take him to visit every corner of the country, covering 160,000 kilometers across 46 states. His project, like Johnson’s, was also huge: to build the definitive map of poverty in the United States. The result is an extraordinary book, just published by Contrasto, which is part of a long and rich tradition of narrating hardship and marginalization: the desperate peasants of the thirties told in Furore by John Steinbeck, in the songs of Woody Guthrie and in the photos of Dorothea Lange; the African Americans of the segregated America of the sixties told by Gordon Parks; the workers traumatized by the industrial crisis of the early 2000s, who appear in novels such as American rust by Philipp Meyer.

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Black’s goal was to travel all over the country without leaving that socio-economic band that the government defines as “concentrated poverty” (ie communities where at least one fifth of the population lives below the poverty line), to demonstrate that in the United States misery is much more widespread than imagined and, as a result, it is also much closer to the richer cities and suburbs of the country. At a time when Western politicians tend to speak of the poor with violence or rhetoric – in any case always in an abstract way – Matt Black’s photographs are like a reality bath.

And they remind us how poverty, and possible solutions, are intertwined with the great problems of the United States today. Prison and what comes after, for example. Black says in one of the precious travel notebooks that accompany the images: “Ken was released from prison in 2014. He couldn’t find a stable job, so he lives in his daughter’s house and sleeps on the floor in his nephew’s bedroom. ‘I take $ 7.25 an hour. I am 48 and time is not in my favor. When they read prejudiced they turn away. Everywhere, in any field, I am seen as a possible failure. They say that I have paid my debt to the company, but when will I really be free? ”.

Or environmental degradation: “Arnulfo lives in a shack he built himself on the banks of the New River, a river that crosses the border with Mexico. It seems that its waters are the most polluted in America: the stench of sewage and chemicals can be heard tens of meters away. From time to time Arnulfo crosses the border with Mexico: ‘Over there I am a rich man, here I am homeless’ ”.

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Or the historical weight of discrimination against minorities. From the Native American Reservation in Wind River, Wyoming: “The reservation has existed since before the birth of the state. Early school leaving reached 40 percent. Teenagers are twice as likely to commit suicide. The crime rate is seven times higher than the national one. Unemployment is 86 percent. A man tells me: ‘We are prisoners of war. They are still strangling us. In the culture of poverty, war is waged for nothing, people fight garbage ‘”.

(Text by Alessio Marchionna)

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