The work of Matt Eich is getting noticed. Last week's gallery reception and artist's talk at Medium Festival were both well attended and received. Beyond the boundaries of our San Diego venue, the work is the subject of major editorial attention in CNN, The New Yorker, Photograph Magazine, and PDN.
Finding family in a 'brokenhearted' Appalachian town by Hailey Middlebrow, CNN
"I Feel Forgotten" : A decade of Struggle in Rural Ohio by Kate Linthicum, The New Yorker
Portfolio : Matt Eich by Jean Dykstra, Photograph Magazine
Matt Eich's Ohio Lovesong by Rebecca Robertson, PDN (Photo District News)
Excerpt from PDN
In muddy yards and dark bars, at kitchen tables and in trailers, Eich’s subjects smoke and talk, nap and drink, acting out a rich life with limited resources. An odd assortment of animals appear throughout—a zebra in a snowy backyard, ferrets at bath time, a troupe of all-white cats. Like his images of pristine woods and green grass, these connect Eich’s subjects to the cyles of the land. But nature and domestic life pause at the center of the book, in a full page spread showing the grey pit of a strip mine being worked by heavy machines. Writes Eich in the book, “Mining corporations stripped Appalachia of its resources from the 1820s to the 1960s. After taking all that they could, the corporations departed, leaving former boomtowns with little but their cultural identity.” His images record the results of that era, as residents “attempt to recover in the aftermath of extractive industry,” struggling through poverty to raise the next generation with the same strong, stubborn connection to this land. The book, he writes, “is my love song to Ohio.”