I feel a deep sense of gratitude towards the Alexia Foundation. First, one of their grants helped me when I was a student, and then another grant helped advance my professional work. I feel very lucky about that, very appreciative.
For the past several years I've done a series of stories about rural California, each focusing on a different aspect of life. The Alexia grant helped me finish my work on one of those stories - the Black Okies. They're a group of sharecroppers who migrated to the Valley over a half century ago, and there are just a handful of them left. A lot of the people I photographed have since died. I really was in the nick of time. It's an important piece of history to have documented.
Many times I've photographed situations like these in small towns in rural California: Mothers bathing their children out of buckets; recent immigrants living ten per room without electricity or running water; workers getting paid $20 for a ten hour day picking grapes in 100 degree heat; pregnant women from southern Mexico with silver dollar sized blisters on their feet from crossing the border.
But these sorts of stories, generally, are tough. They are easy for people to ignore. It makes doing this type of work difficult, but it's also what I find most satisfying about it. Through your work, you really can put these places on the map, get people interested in places and stories they would have never been exposed to. You are not just running with a pack of photographers rehashing the day's news. Of course, you really are on your own, and being able to get the resources for this kind of project is difficult. I spent the better part of three years working on the Black Okies and was in pretty deep personally, financially and otherwise. The grant solved a lot of problems.
The Alexia Foundation really is unlike anything else. How it came to be makes it a very special award to receive. It is not a grant coming from a camera company, or a corporate charity. The grant came to be for a special reason, and it's given to you for a special purpose. The grant funds came to me with a hand-written note from Mrs. Tsairis. The whole experience makes you feel like part of the family, and it pushes you too. You feel doubly honored. - Matt Black
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Newhouse School of Public Communications
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