This monograph selects photographs from the third of a four-volume oeuvre, The Invisible Yoke, by the emerging photographer Matt Eich on the American Condition. The Invisible Yoke : vol. III : The Seven Cities was published in 2020 by Sturm & Drang, and follows vol. I : Carry Me Ohio and vol. II : Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town.

As Eich’s expanded survey of contemporary America continues, he turns his lens close to home, examining his native state and including images of his own family. The “seven cities” refers to the major cities of the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia: Chesapeak, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, and Virginia Beach. Hope and doom seem linked in these images. Life, death, family, and community are as central as is the protagonist uniting it all- water. This water falls, rises, and floods in premonition of the inevitable for the region. Erosion and sea-rise threaten The Seven Cites as they do many densely populated costal cities in states stretching the US seaboard. That these places will be lost one day in the not too distant future adds urgency to the issues faced by all we see, today. Matt Eich’s photographs are enhanced by a booklet that includes poems, Twin Stranger by Tim Seibles and Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith and an essay, How to Mourn the Living by Seth Feman, of the Chrysler Museum. Feman writes Eich’s photographs :

“ lay out, in strikingly elegant terms, the lives we were living here and the threats posed to us by the rising sea, which threw interconnected social problems- like poverty, reacism, healthcare, and violence- into high relief. . . At this late date, action seems important. Some have even referred to the years between 2009 and 2019, roughly the years of Matt’s project, as the ‘lost decade,’ the now-shut window during which the state and corporate leaders squandered every last-ditch effort to stave off the climate breakdown. . . Can we call them ‘better days’ when we knew full well of the coming calamity but were trying so hard to live that we failed to prevent ourselves from dying?”