The Geographies of Poverty: Modernist Photo Texts in the Age of Social Media

This essay explores the representation of economic precarity in the twenty-first century, and particularly how new media technologies have impacted such representations, through two photo-text projects: Matt Black’s American Geography (2014-Present) and Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye’s When Living is a Protest (2015-Present). Both adapt the visual style of New Deal documentary practiced by photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Gordon Parks – a genre that Jeff Allred refers to as the “modernist photo text” – to document the after-effects of the 2008 Great Recession; and both specifically were created to circulate on Instagram, the image-and-text based social media platform initially launched in October 2010. Black’s and Roye’s Instagram series exemplify a resurgence in documentary following the financial collapse of 2008. At the same time, they offer limit cases for the way that “born digital” literary and visual art can re-imagine modernism’s insistence on media specificity for twenty-first century artistic works, especially those keyed to capturing the social life of economic crisis.