I Love You, I’m Leaving
September 6 – 30, 2018
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 an antidote.
These photographs were made during a time of general domestic unease, when my parents separated after 33 years of marriage, my siblings all experienced drastic changes in their lives, my wife, children and I moved to a new city, and my last living grandparent passed away.
The title of this series, I Love You, I’m Leaving, stems from the constant rhythm of my peripatetic life. It holds true when I leave my family to photograph strangers, and leave strangers to return home.
This series borrows from personal experience, and the visual language of the everyday in order to create a fictional account that mirrors my reality. Photographs are reductions, distillations, half-truths and complete fabrications. They can only describe the surface of things, while I am interested in the intangible – memory and emotional resonance.
Despite our intimacy, the people I am closest to are unknowable, and will always remain a mystery to me. I photograph with the knowledge that our place in this world is tenuous, comprised of little more than memory and story. Memory is fragile; the moments are fleeting and have to be wrestled into a permanent state.
Matt Eich is a photographic essayist working on long-form projects related to memory, family, community, and the American condition.
Matt’s projects have received grant support from an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, an Aperture/Google Creator Labs Photo Fund, two Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography and two VMFA Professional Visual Arts Fellowships. His work has been exhibited in more than 20 solo shows, in addition to numerous festivals and group exhibitions. Matt’s prints and books are held in the collections of The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The New York Public Library, Chrysler Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Cassilhaus, and The Do Good Fund. Matt was an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work in 2013, and at a Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019.
Eich holds a BS in photojournalism from Ohio University and an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School’s International Limited-Residency Program. He is the author of five monographs, Carry Me Ohio (Sturm & Drang, 2016), I Love You, I’m Leaving, (ceiba editions, 2017), Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town (Sturm & Drang, 2018), The Seven Cities (Sturm & Drang, 2020) and We, the Free (Sturm & Drang, 2024).
Matt is an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at Corcoran School of Arts & Design at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He makes books under the imprint Little Oak.PRESS and resides with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.