A Nation Deranged
March 26, 2025 at 12:28AMFor The New York Review of Books, Ben Mauk considers The Invisible Yoke, a four-book series of photographs from Matt Eich that presents “evidence of a nation’s derangement.” Eich, whose photojournalism credits include The Guardian and The New York Times, devoted nearly 20 years to the project, patiently developing a book that, Mauk writes, “seems to contain a critique of the whole country.” Writing about photography can seem, at its most gratifying, like an act of divination; here, Mauk honors the inscrutability of Eich’s work but also grants it considerable impact, raising patterns–arresting, disturbing, familiar–from out of the darkness.
Trump himself appears only once in the series, on a Jumbotron screen in Washington D.C., where he stands together with (and blocking our view of) Barack Obama. It would be temporally inaccurate to call The Invisible Yoke a bookmark of the Trump turn, or a rebuttal of J.D. Vance’s bootstrap myth-making, but photography is often drafted into a larger battle of history. One can’t help but see a panorama of an unraveling country: the downwardly mobile white and Black working classes, the military, the guns, the drugs, the hoarded wealth.
The Invisible Yoke also takes special interest in our disconnection from the natural world. The Ohio prairie is an open-pit wasteland. The mouth of the Chesapeake is filled with warships and industry. In Missouri a tornado-ravaged tree supports a tattered American flag and a cross. Eich also loves pairings of humans with animals who enact cliches of atomized social life—“crabs in a bucket,” “sick as a dog”—or invent new conceits that seem already familiar. Throughout the books are snakes, sometimes being charmed or captured (or, in one case, skinned) by children, and if they do not quite say “Don’t tread on me” they produce the same feeling of libertarian alienation as the Gadsden flag.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/25/a-nation-deranged/
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