The photobook is a strange medium. It combines two technologies—one about as old as Christianity, the other younger than the United States. If photographs
via The New York Review of Books: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/23/a-nation-deranged/
Matt Eich’s photobook series, “The Invisible Yoke,” is an exorcism of the country’s demons.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/23/a-nation-deranged/?src=longreads
Matt Eich is a tenacious storyteller, whose work is largely defined by long-term projects that offer intimate depictions of the American condition. I first saw Matt’s photographs as a featured alumni on the Eddie Adams Workshop site in 2006. At that time,
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/08/photographers-on-photographers-zachary-kaufman-in-conversation-with-matt-eich/
Matt Eich: You are right that the photographer dance is a tricky one – how to be emotionally engaged and present while also removed enough to see things clearly and render a scene in a lasting way? I advocate for young photographers getting to know their tools the way a musician knows their instrument. When it comes time to make, you don’t want to be caught up in the technical, you want to be in a somewhat Zen state, so the camera is less of a barrier between you and what is unfolding and more of a conduit for channeling a shared experience. This is idealistic, but occasionally comes to fruition.
Five photographers reveal a complex and ambivalent portrait of a mysterious place in this collection of photography from Appalachia.
via Feature Shoot: https://www.featureshoot.com/2023/04/photography-from-appalachia-5-projects-explore-a-complex-place/
“I’m certainly aware of the stereotypes, clichés, and exploitation this area has been exposed to by many entities,” the photographer Rich-Joseph Facun once told us. “I want to be clear: I’m not here to define what Appalachia is or isn’t.” In this collection, we take a look back at some of the most powerful photography from Appalachia, created by five visual storytellers, each with a different perspective.
Meet the twenty winning artists recognized by Aperture and Google’s Creator Labs for their exceptional photographic visions.
via Aperture: https://aperture.org/editorial/announcing-creator-labs-photo-fund-winners-2021/
This summer, Aperture and Google’s Creator Labs teamed up to launch a new initiative, the Creator Labs Photo Fund, aimed at providing financial support to photographers in the wake of COVID-19. Selected by Aperture’s editors, the twenty winning artists are recognized for their exceptional vision as well as the strength and originality of their portfolios, and will be awarded a prize of $5,000 each to sustain their work and practice.
“Everything seems somehow familiar and distant at the same time. It is as if time has wedged us between the fever dream of summer and the insoluble gaslighting conjured up from what was believed to be a significantly flawed, but tolerable near past”
via AMERICAN SUBURB X: https://americansuburbx.com/2021/01/matt-eichs-the-seven-cities.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=matt-eichs-the-seven-cities
“Everything seems somehow familiar and distant at the same time. It is as if time has wedged us between the fever dream of summer and the insoluble gaslighting conjured up from what was believed to be a significantly flawed, but tolerable near past”
"The Seven Cities" is the third in his series called "The Invisible Yoke." Here he looks at the people and places of Hampton Roads, and at the weight of memory.
via pilotonline.com: https://www.pilotonline.com/entertainment/books/vp-db-book-seven-cities-matt-eich-120620-20201206-samwcxp6jnahblykszjdbbv544-story.html
Eich’s latest photography book, “The Seven Cities,” is a look at the places and people that make up Hampton Roads. It shows the variety that anyone can discover in an hour’s drive from an oyster roast in Suffolk to a Russian Orthodox Church service in Virginia Beach to an Amtrak bus station stop in Newport News. It also illuminates the grief, hope, anxiety and laughter of its people.
A new exhibition of work by Matt Eich at jdc fine art draws from a year and a half of prolific image-making in an ongoing visual journal series t…
Link: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/matt-eich-s-seasonal-blues/
A new exhibition of work by Matt Eich at jdc fine art draws from a year and a half of prolific image-making in an ongoing visual journal series titled, Seasonal Blues. This string of work links moments together like a never-ending chain. A selection of the work exists as limited-edition prints and many more appear in small-run quarterly self-published books by the emerging artist (under the imprint Little Oak Press). Time- the fleeting baseline of life itself- is revealed in Eich’s Seasonal Blues. As Eich creates this image of the world, he seeks to locate himself within it.
In February of 2006 I unknowingly began making images that would later become an all-consuming project lasting for more than four years. I am excited to announce the first real printing of this body of work. Edited by Mike Davis and designed by his wife Deb Pang Davis of Cococello Design, it contains an afterword by Brian Paul Clamp, director of ClampArt in New York.
Matt Eich (b. 1986) is a freelance photographer and founding member of Luceo Images. His work is rooted in memory, both personal and collective and he strives to approach every photograph with a sense of intimacy. He believes that stories are the fabric of history and that they have the power to inform and transform open-minded viewers.
[slidepress gallery=’matteich-carrymeohio’] Hover over the image for navigation and full screen controls EPF 2010 Finalist Matt Eich Carry Me Ohio play this essay Once known for …
via burn magazine: https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2010/06/matt-eich-carry-me-ohio/
In this series of images I show the isolated and trapped residents of Southeastern Ohio. From Hercules the German Shepherd, chained to his house in the snow to Timmy, asleep on the couch, trapped in his body and requiring around the clock care from his family. Despite their bleak surroundings there is still a sense of whimsy and beauty in the lives of the region’s occupants. They opened their homes to me and this is my love song to the place I once lived.
I mention the following probably just because I have Leicas on the brain after the past couple of days, but it strikes me that the S90 and S95 might be the up to the minute analog of the original Leica—the so-called “Barnack camera.” It’s capable but stealthy, as tiny as it can reasonably be, supremely portable and able to be carried virtually anywhere
So a photographer walks into a bar. And, in the case of Matt Eich, he emerges with a newfound way of looking at the world.
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/finding-clarity-in-ambiguity/
It was then that I lost the sense of guilt that used to come from making pictures that didn’t have an actual narrative. I started to become more comfortable with ambiguity and with the sort of timelessness.
Matt Eich: One day, while wandering a small village in southeastern Ohio, I stumbled on a rugged-looking man and his two sons cleaning up muddy dirt bikes at a car wash. Most of the folks I had encountered up until this point were incredibly distrustful of outsiders, so I was immediately drawn in by his open demeanor. He seemed just as curious about me as I was about him.
Matt Eich Say Hello to Everybody, OK? [ EPF 2019 FINALIST ] In 2019-2020 I will be commuting from Charlottesville, Virginia to Washington, D.C. via train on a weekly basis. I also intend to walk …
via burn magazine: https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2019/09/matt-eich-say-hello-to-everybody-ok/
In 2019-2020 I will be commuting from Charlottesville, Virginia to Washington, D.C. via train on a weekly basis. I also intend to walk the train line in intervals, photographing the scenes I encounter on its peripheries. I view the train line as an artery between my home in Charlottesville (where my heart stays), and Washington, DC, the seat of power in the United States. During my days in Washington, DC I will document the dichotomy between the powerful and the powerless. During my days in Charlottesville, I will photograph my own family, and my community. The background for these images are the final days of Trump’s first term in office, and the lead-up to the next Presidential elections. By juxtaposing powerful circles in Washington, DC with the recovering community of Charlottesville, VA, and the largely rural area in between, I will attempt to put my finger on the pulse of our country during this critical time.
At this particular time I have no one Particular person to grieve for, though there must Be many, many unknown ones going to dust I often recall this verse by Elizabeth Jennings from her poem In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me when I view images that cause
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2018/03/matt-eich-i-love-you-im-leaving/
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.
Matt Eich I Love You, I’m Leaving [ EPF 2017 – FINALIST ] My introduction to photography was in childhood, as my grandmother was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. The hopelessness of …
via burn magazine: http://www.burnmagazine.org/epf-2017/2017/11/matt-eich-i-love-you-im-leaving/
My introduction to photography was in childhood, as my grandmother was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. The hopelessness of her plight triggered something within me, and when my grandfather handed me a camera, making photographs became a way of stabilizing the insecurity of memory and accessing emotional resonance. If we are at risk of forgetting too much of our world, and ourselves, photography is the antidote.
Life in Ohio’s proud but economically abandoned small towns
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/12/carry-me-ohio/507539/
Just over a decade ago, Matt Eich started photographing rural Ohio. Largely inhabited by what is now known as the “Forgotten Class” of white, blue-collar workers, Eich found himself drawn to the proud but economically abandoned small towns of Appalachia
Long before Trump began appealing to rural white America, the photographer Matt Eich spent years listening to what people who feel forgotten have to say.
via The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/i-feel-forgotten-a-decade-of-struggle-in-rural-ohio?mbid=rss
Long before Trump began appealing to rural white America, the photographer Matt Eich spent years listening to what people who feel forgotten have to say.