Just over a decade ago, Matt Eich started photographing rural Ohio. Largely inhabited by what is now known as the “Forgotten Class” of white, blue-collar workers, Eich found himself drawn to the proud but economically abandoned small towns of Appalachia. Thanks to grants from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Getty Images, Eich was able to capture the family life, drug abuse, poverty, and listlessness of these communities. “Long before Trump was a player on the political scene, long before he was a Republican, these people existed and these problems existed,” Eich said. His new book, Carry Me Ohio, published by Sturm and Drang, is a collection of these images and the first of four books he plans to publish as part of The Invisible Yoke, a photographic meditation on the American condition. Even with a deep knowledge of the region, Eich was unprepared for the fury and energy that surrounded the election this year. “The anger is overpowering,” he said. “I knew what was going on, and I’m still surprised. I should have listened to the pictures.”
Richie Goins Jr. watches from the window of his parents’ trailer as cinderblocks are brought in to make a foundation for his grandmother’s new trailer, March 9, 2006. Leetha Goins, her children—Timmy, 25; Troy, 16—and her grandson, Will, were displaced when a drunk driver swerved off the road and crashed into their trailer in Chauncey, Ohio. Leetha would die of cervical cancer the following year. #
Left: Richie Goins takes a break from hustling for pills to smoke a cigarette in his trailer in Chauncey, April 14, 2010. Previously occupied by his mother, Leetha, the place has become an Oxy den, frequently teeming with pill poppers asking for more: “Got 15s or 30s?” Right: Identical twins Kacey and Lacey Sellers, 5, stand in the window of their family’s home in Chauncey, January 21, 2007. #
Clayton Ator riles up his dogs, Shank and Money, after getting stoned, February 5, 2007. Ator learned to “shoot ink” in prison and does prison-style tattoos out of his living room in Carbondale, Ohio.#
Left: Lacey Sellers wanders out in the middle of the street in Chauncey to examine the skid mark her father’s car left as he drove away in 2006. She and twin Kacey were both born deaf. Right: Family photographs perched atop the television in Guy McRobert’s home in Russellville, Ohio, June 23, 2012.#
A collection of medicine bottles lines the Sellers’s window in Chauncey; the family struggles with an assortment of health problems. Beyond the bottles, Hercules crouches to watch children playing in the snow, April 7, 2009. #
Tylor Woodrum, 16, holds a box containing his father’s ashes at his home in Carbondale, Ohio, January 30, 2007. Dave Woodrum was killed in August 2006 in a high-impact four-wheeler accident. Dave’s family mounted his favorite cock-fighting rooster on top of the box. #
Left: Kacey Sellers bathes the ferrets she and Lacey keep as pets. The girls recently left Chauncey after their parents moved to the larger urban area of Columbus, Ohio. Now they attend a school for deaf children. Right: Jesse Sellers Jr., his hair still wet from a bath, stands in his kitchen in Chauncey holding the trophy he won that day for his first dirt-bike competition, February 5, 2006. “It was so cold and he wanted to quit,” Jesse Sr. said. “But I told him we needed those points and he had to finish. He won something his first race!”#
A Grevy’s zebra named Elvis stomps in the snow of his outdoor pen at The Wilds in Cumberland, Ohio, February 27, 2007. Situated on 10,000 acres of reclaimed strip-mine land, The Wilds is a research and conservation facility for rare and endangered animals. During the warmer months, animals are allowed to roam freely, but in the winter, they are mainly kept in heated indoor pens. #
Competition in the 2018 Asian Games, the new tallest statue in the world under construction in India, memorials for both Aretha Franklin and Senator John McCain, and much more
