Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present New World Atlas: California & Nevada, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by American photographer Matt Black. Known for his visceral approach to documentary photography, Black turns his focus to the evolving climate of the American West, using thermal and infrared imaging to examine the effects of extreme weather events and the vulnerabilities of a rapidly shifting landscape.

New World Atlas is organized in a series of 17 chapters, one for each state lying west of the 100th meridian. This exhibition presents California & Nevada, the first two chapters of this larger body of work. In this series Black departs from conventional photographic representation and incorporates technologies that extend human perception. Thermal imaging makes the invisible visible, allowing viewers to witness heat as a signifier of change, from drought and fire to evaporation. Infrared photography distinguishes the living from the inert, exposing a shifting terrain beneath what once seemed immutable.

Based in California’s Central Valley, Black draws on his own experience with the region’s environmental volatility. He writes: “Giga-fires, mega-droughts, and thousand-year floods are reshaping the American West. From my home, I have seen massive Sierra wildfires fill the sky with smoke, and over 500,000 acres of farmland fall fallow for lack of water.” By working across the sub-humid and arid zones of the American West, areas particularly susceptible to shifts in temperature and moisture, New World Atlas offers an urgent and deeply felt chronicle of ecological transformation. Rather than documenting catastrophe alone, Black’s images invite viewers to consider new ways of seeing and understanding a landscape increasingly defined by extremes.

A monograph of his series American Geography was published in 2021 by Thames & Hudson, accompanying an institutional exhibition that traveled to Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2020–21) and Kunstfoyer Munich (2021), and was also exhibited at the Robert Koch Gallery (2022). His second monograph, American Artifacts, published by Thames & Hudson in 2024, presents a further evolution of this work, combining photographs with found objects collected during his travels.

Matt Black’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s, and The California Sunday Magazine, as well as international publications including Le Monde (France) and Internazionale (Italy), among others. A member of Magnum Photos, Black has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective, and received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award for Humanistic Photography in 2015.