  Localization due to the presence of disorder has proven crucial for our
current understanding of relaxation in isolated quantum systems. The many-body
localized phase constitutes a robust alternative to the thermalization of
complex interacting systems, but recently the importance of disorder has been
brought into question. Starting from translationally invariant $(1 +
1)$-dimensional quantum electrodynamics, we modify the dynamics of the gauge
field and reveal a mechanism of disorder-free localization. We consider two
different discretizations of the continuum model resulting in a free-fermion
soluble model in one case and an interacting model in the other. We diagnose
the localization in the far-from-equilibrium dynamics following a global
quantum quench.
