Matt Black’s The Geography of Poverty newsprint has been distributed alongside his exhibition at Photoville in New York in 2015.

For his ongoing project The Geography of Poverty, Matt Black has traveled 48,000 miles across 44 US states, photographing designated “poverty areas,” communities whose poverty rates are in excess of 20%, and highlighting the country’s growing gap between rich and poor.

According to the Census Bureau’s measure of poverty —$11,490 annual income for one person or $23,550 for a family of four — over 43 million people qualify as poor in the US. At the same time, the share of income going to the top one percent of the populhas more than doubled since the 1970s. At the very top, the richest 0.1 percent’s share of the national wealth has tripled.

The Geography of Poverty gives its focus to America’s most marginalized communities, from the deserts of the Southwest through the Black Belt in the South, to the post-industrial, former factory towns running Midwest and Northeast.