Photographer examines, celebrates his local roots
Matt Eich grew up in Suffolk with many of the images that are in his latest book — kids cooling themselves in a pool on a sweltering day. Early morning light coloring a beach. Boys rapturously shooting hoops at a park.
Then he moved away, married, had a child, and returned as a photographer, carrying his camera. The images were the same, but different. The images now meant community and a vibrant place to build a family in the diversity of what is Hampton Roads. They also showed stark socioeconomic and racial divides. They showed cities in imminent danger of being consumed by rising tides.
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.
It is a quick peek, Eich says: Photographs and books can’t possibly capture the layers that constitute a place. For this project alone, he and the photo editor reduced thousands of images taken over a 14-year period to 60.
“I think it took me to leave home and return to see it clearly,” said Eich, who now lives in Charlottesville. “I wasn’t able to see the place for its beauty and its complexities. … I felt like it came to life for me in a different way.”
“Seven Cities” is the third in a series called “The Invisible Yoke,” which is published by Sturm & Drang, an independent photo-book publisher in Switzerland. The yoke is this unseen weight of memory that Eich,
34, says we all carry but can be heavier, sometimes too heavy, for others.
He realized the power of photography when he was young. His grandmother was dying from Alzheimer’s disease and his grandfather took Eich on a road trip. His grandfather gave him a point-and-shoot and the boy snapped a shot of a desolate landscape. He was surprised at what he felt when he looked at the photo.
“It triggered an awareness that photography was capable of transporting emotionally through time and space, containing some sort of emotional resonance, even though I wasn’t sure what that meant,” he said. “But it was clear to me that memory is fallible and without memory, who are we?”
Eich went to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and became obsessive about documenting people, always attracted to “the fringes of things.”
One of those communities was rural Mineral, Ohio, where mining and manufacturing jobs had long evaporated and left people feeling desperate and dejected. Despite poverty and rampant drug addiction, people clung to one another.
In 2010, the work was selected for a juried show in Houston. Eich thought it was a big deal for his career, so he borrowed some money and published a book of the work to sell with the show. He called it “Carry Me Ohio.” One of the copies ended up in a used-book shop in California. One day a Swiss publisher happened to be in the store and asked for something new and interesting. He was handed Eich’s book, and tracked him down.
Eich had moved back to Virginia and had started traveling back and forth to Greenwood, Mississippi, an area he visited while on a freelance assignment documenting healthcare in rural towns.
Greenwood was known for its Delta blues and being thereabouts the place where a 14-year-old African American teen named Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman in a store.
Eich was enamored by an insular Black neighborhood called Baptist Town that continued to live with the consequences of slavery, segregation and racism. Here, too, poverty seemed passed down like family recipes, but the people welcomed Eich to tell their stories.
“People were living and loving one another with the vitality that — I don’t know, it just felt like a breath of fresh air,” he said. “People were coming out of their home and being like, ‘Come on inside. Let me tell you about this. Let me show you this. Let me feed you this.’ It was hard to be a stranger in that place.”
In both areas, Eich said people carried the yoke of being stereotyped and forgotten and being dismissed by outsiders as “those people.”
He spent seven years off and on in Mississippi and published “Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town” in 2018, his sequel to “Carry Me Ohio.”
“The communities maintained this kind of coexistence that requires one another to make it work,” Eich said. “The kind of through-line between the different places was resilience, solidarity, community.”
The publishers liked Eich’s idea of creating a series of books. Now he has a fourth he plans to publish next year, one looking at America as a whole.
It will have the idea of
community and resilience that he discovered when he, his wife and their young daughter moved back to the area in 2009, settling in the Larchmont area of Norfolk.
They have since had another child, and both his daughters appear in “Seven Cities” as a part of this community. The work first debuted at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach in 2013.
Like his other volumes, “Seven Cities” carries little text. The photos have no captions. Eich said photos and text can often make a wonderful marriage but he didn’t want them competing in his books. The image titles appear on a back page.
Eich keeps his words to a dedication page and he dedicated the first book to his wife, Melissa; the Mississippi edition to their older daughter, Madelyn; and his local piece to the younger, Meira.
He reserves words for pieces written primarily by local people who can put the work into context.
For “Seven Cities” he asked Tim Seibles, a former poet laureate for the state and a retired English professor at Old Dominion University, to write a piece. He also includes a poem by Stevie Smith.
Seth Feman, deputy director for art and interpretation and curator of photography at the Chrysler Museum of Art, wrote an essay. In it, he says Eich’s photos alternate between the “immediacy of photojournalism and the intimacy of a family album.”
The tenderness he shows his daughters, Feman wrote, is the same that he extends to strangers he’s met. That’s all Eich really wants to do with his work.
“This is very naïve and I know it’s limited in what it can do, but I want to stretch people’s capacity for empathy,” Eich said. “Especially in these times, right? Instead of ‘these people’ or ‘those people,’ I hope people will look at what connects us instead of what separates us.”
“The Seven Cities” is available at the Chrysler Museum store and online for $62.50. Museum members receive a 10% discount. The book can also be ordered at sturmanddrang.net. The book costs about $60, and U.S. orders ship from Charlottesville.