American Artifacts begins with what Matt Black picked up from roadsides and sidewalks while making American Geography. Over six years, he travelled through communities across the United States identified by the US Census as areas of “concentrated poverty,” where at least 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line. The objects he collected—eventually numbering in the thousands—became a material counterpart to his photographs of economic inequality.

The inventory ranges from plastic cutlery, lottery tickets, bottles and matchbooks to job applications, medical documents and driving licences. Family photographs, letters, jewellery and eyeglasses register private lives; gloves, damaged tools, wire, bolts and bent nails speak of work and its exhaustion. Black treats these things neither as curiosities nor as neutral evidence. Removed from the ground yet tied to the places where they were found, they acquire the force of fragments: modest signs of aspiration, labour, bureaucracy, loss and survival.

The book brings together photographs of individual objects, assemblages and collages, alongside previously unpublished images from American Geography and the voices of people excluded from the promise of the “American Dream.” This movement between object, image and testimony broadens the documentary field. Poverty appears not only in faces and landscapes, but in paperwork carried, tools used, possessions misplaced and disposable goods left behind. The result is an archaeology of dispossession assembled from contemporary American life.

Published by Thames & Hudson in 2024, the 172-page hardcover is conceived as a companion to American Geography, but it establishes a distinct method and emphasis. For collectors attentive to how photobooks build meaning through archives, categories and juxtaposition, American Artifacts offers a consequential extension of Black’s project. It shows how documentary photography can be reconsidered through the physical residue surrounding an image—and how an apparently ordinary object may hold social history without surrendering its ambiguity.