Matt Eich: I Love You, I’m Leaving | LENSCRATCH

I often recall this verse by Elizabeth Jennings from her poem In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me when I view images that cause my heart to ache, that force me to empathize and consider the threads that join together our collective stories. The images in Matt Eich’s newest monograph, I Love You, I’m Leaving, published by Ceiba Editions, weave these threads into a complicated yet tender, semi-fictional portrait of a family enduring the chaos and elation of life. Every photograph is steeped in a familiar, heavy kind of tension that can be recognized by any viewer. We are invited to experience at once both pain and joy, love and frustration, closeness and distance, sharp reality and fleeting memory. Eich uses his camera to grasp at the apparitions of human experience, in his words, wrestling fragile memories into a permanent state. Everything from the cover image of a half-erased chalkboard, to the cyclical nature of the book sequence, echoes Eich’s attempts to construct something concrete from the intangible, creating at once a book object that feels both uniquely personal and profoundly universal.