Congratulations to Matt Eich whose photobook series The Invisible Yoke earned critical attention from the New York Review of Books. A Nation Deranged by Ben Mauk makes a sweeping overview of the contemporary artist’s long form study on America. In the article, Mauk makes parallels to photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958). A lifetime later, Eich covers the same landscape as the master photographer with his own gripping effect.
The Invisible Yoke Box Set
The Invisible Yoke" “is an exorcism of America’s demons. . . it documents a period between 2006 and 2018, but the books appeared between 2016 and 2024, what we might now describe as the early Trump era.”
Through four volumes we are lead on a road-trip across America. Specific place-focused works compose the first three volumes, Carry Me Ohio, Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town, and The Seven Cities. The scope expands out into a more general and broad view of contemporary America in the last title, We the Free. This approach allows us to go deep, see parallels, and create expansive connections. Writes Mauk:
Tylor holding his father’s ashes, Carbondale, Ohio, 2007
Even when the subjects themselves are given space to speak, Eich’s images refuse to converge on a single meaning. They remain semantically open, like certain jokes. A woman on a couch grasps a pack of cigarettes in one hand and with the other salutes, a parakeet perched on her palm. A man studies a chicken in his living room with something like concern. An alligator is shot in the head at close range, its brains exploding into a river, firearm at the edge of the frame.
Some of Eich’s photographs are so bizarre that it would be a pity to explain them. In an image near the end of Carry Me Ohio, a zebra walks in a fenced yard as snow falls. The ground is white; the trees beyond the fence suggest deep winter. Internet research suggests that the zebra’s name is Elvis and the yard adjoins 10,000 acres of a reclaimed strip mine in Cumberland, Ohio, that is now a research center for endangered animals. But no explanation can displace the viewer’s first impression that a wild creature has been enclosed, unnaturally and cruelly, in a suburban backyard.
Elvis the Zebra, Cumberland, Ohio, 2008
Falling off her father’s back, Athens, Ohio, 2009
Butta’s funeral, Greenwood, Mississippi, 2010
The Gallery presented two of Eich’s The Invisible Yoke series as solo-shows: Carry Me Ohio in 2016 and Sin and Salvation in Baptist Town in 2018.