Prolongance

Photography by Eric Laverty

At a young age, I was immersed in the world of photography, though not in the way one might romanticize. My mother, an unwavering chronicler of our family’s life, approached the medium with an intensity that often eclipsed the moments she sought to preserve. Her camera, always poised to document, transformed family interactions into performances, where the act of capturing frequently superseded the act of living. Through this relentless prioritization of memory capture over connection I developed an acute awareness of the camera’s power to fracture and create detachment.

While I deeply value the legacy of my mother’s work, her compulsions instilled in me a complex relationship with photography. I came to see it as less an act of preservation than a force capable of shaping and often distorting reality. As my relationship with the medium evolved, from one of distrust and even distain, it inspired a desire to rethink the motivations behind its practice and to challenge its conventions.

Today, my work seeks to address this tension. Rather than using photography to merely fix moments in place, I approach it as an evolving process — a collaboration between myself, the camera, and the environment. My methods transform the act of photographing from a potentially alienating experience into one of engagement, where movement, interaction, and spontaneity are woven into the image. In doing so, I aim to reclaim photography as a medium of connection, emphasizing fluidity, imperfection, and the ephemeral.

This personal history underpins my concept of Prolongance, a term that encapsulates my approach to creating durational, layered montages. Each image is an act of reconciliation, weaving together the fractured dynamics I observed in my youth into something cohesive, alive, and profoundly human. By embracing the imperfections and contingencies inherent in the process, I strive to redefine photography’s role—not as a passive observer of life but as an active participant in its unfolding. I use it to open a space to practice being present and

Eric P. Laverty - New York

BIOGRAPHY

Eric Laverty is an artist and photographer from Detroit, MI USA. He completed his formal studies as a guest student of Gerhard Richter during the German painter's final years of tenure at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where fellow professors Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jan Dibbets, and Nam June Paik, along with Richter, became enduring influences on Laverty's art and creative perspective.

Prior to his 5-year German sojourn in the early '90s, Laverty studied Photography under Jim Dow at SMFA - Boston. Prior to SMFA, as he pursued a BA at the University of Michigan, Laverty was inspired to think and communicate his ideas pictorially during a seminar with Michael Taussig (now at Columbia University), and motivated to re-consider a degree in Anthropology. He dedicated his final year on University of Michigan's North Campus immersed in an intensive Bauhaus-styled design and Fine Art curriculum before moving to Boston and SMFA.

Throughout his studies, Laverty continued to master and apply his skills at the forefront of computer-generated graphic design, which he began training just after high school graduation. This not only sustained his academic studies but became the backbone of a professional career in design and creative management until he shifted entirely to his first and primary medium of photography. It was at this time, while focused on architectural imaging and the built environment, Laverty began re-engaging his art practice with the introduction of Structural Catabolism (see below).

Laverty's work now fuses street and forensic photography, assemblage, selfie-ism, performance, and new approaches to time-lapse and stop-action photography. His in-camera collages cut, slice, rip, and curl; fragment, flay, straighten, and unfurl all with an emphasis on abstraction and an eye to liberate his photography from convention.

Laverty lives and works in both Brooklyn and Detroit, extending his primary studio onto the streets of NYC where his almost daily peregrinations generate troves of experimental content. His photography, photo-collages and painting have been exhibited in Boston, Düsseldorf, New York, and Brussels and are in private collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Currently a cohort in Yellow Chair Salon's Symposia! with John Yau, Laverty will be joining the Art Cake residency program in October 2025.

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STRUCTURAL CATABOLISM

Throughout my artistic and commercial photography career, my focus has been on the built environment, coining the term Structural Catabolism to better describe my perspectives on space, and the layering/exposing of time and material. Borrowed from biology, Catabolism describes the breakdown of organic material during the metabolic process. In the context of the built environment, I used it to describe the processes involved in demolition while I documented the adaptive reuse of historic structures in New York and the surrounding region. Inspired by the Italian architect, Carlo Scarpa's exposing of the past through layering, I took on a more forensic approach in my process as I bore witness to the rise of a new era in architectural sustainability and sought collaboration with real estate developers and architects with adaptive reuse ambitions.

Structural Catabolism bears witness to industrial transition, capturing the realignment of material and energy before it settles, reconfigured for the future. A process driven by contemporary motivation, characters, and technologies that resuscitate historic structures from their abandoned, decaying, or otherwise antiquated states. It is only through re-engagement that the remarkable nature of these once vital structures is revealed again, and Structural Catabolism begins, inspiring a fleeting cast of shadows in its wake.

While I continues to explore Structural Catabolism, I do so with a twist - figuratively and literally, as in the twisting of the camera in the ongoing 270° Phases series. I challenges my artistic assumptions, spatial awareness, and cultural impact by creating new frameworks in which to extend and redefine the picture frame. Emphasizing abstraction and the formal elements of shape, line, color, and form while embracing movement, spontaneity, and improvisation to shift and jostle perception, I subvert the traditional structures and norms within the medium and engaging space and time from a unique perspective.

270° Phases: Upstream/Downstream- TWA Airport/Hotel Connector (2022)

LOSS, PANDEMIC, AND A NEW WAY FORWARD

The devastating illness and death of my wife, followed in quick succession by the pandemic's isolation and curbing of freedoms and my stepfather's death, plunged me into a period of intense mourning that felt as though it would suffocate. I found solace during the first months of the lockdown, photographing in my backyard, immersing myself in the digitization of my wife's previously unseen drawings—distributing copies amongst friends and family—and developing my stepfather's last 50 rolls of film from Kiev. These projects opened a new dialogue with Elena and Ivan through their respective creative visions, helping me begin a process of healing.

Grieving and feeling acutely unmoored, I learned to breathe again and got back on my bike to seek light and levity. I found a muse on the streets of New York.

As I ventured out into the pandemic-emptied streets of 2020-21, I knew I could not continue as usual. I began questioning the influence of subject matter and process in my photography as I was confronted with the ambiguous loss of NYC rhythm and vitality in its spaces and buildings—physically present, but emotionally gone (Dr. Pauline Boss, Esther Perel). But with far fewer distractions, the streets began revealing previously overlooked and less striking or relevant elements of the built environment. Without the throngs of tourists or bustle of the New York workaday, crosswalk stripes, street signage, bike paths, debris containment fields, and safety barriers came into view as equally valid elements in my compositions as were the structures I had been photographing prior to the lockdown. Elements that I so diligently sought to avoid, erase, or disguise, I now embraced.

Inspired by the motivations behind the upturned paintings of Georg Baselitz, who was surging in online appeal at the time, I turned my images upside down, then began photographing with this upturned intent, freeing the shapes, colors, and forms from their conventional associations. This shift allowed me to invite comparison not only between Baselitz's post-war dystopian landscape and the disorienting nature of the pandemic, but more importantly, helped me push forward, past the past, away from a rigid approach to image-making that would eventually lead out of the confines of traditional single-frame image capture.

My frequent peregrinations, bike excursions, and 'photo yoga' sessions throughout NYC and the region during this time prompted a need for greater flexibility and immediacy in my process. I spent so much time hopping on and off my 1976 Schwinn Continental to unpack, shoot, repack, and repeat, that the convenience and viability of my iPhone was soon tested. This shift opened new possibilities, allowing me to explore panoramic settings that I could only partially replicate with post-processing techniques after capture with the bulkier DSLR equipment. I also wanted to minimize post-processing in the creation of my images and learn how to create more intuitively and fluidly in the present.

Since my years at the SMFA-Boston, I have been using panoramic and collaging techniques to layer space, time, and meaning, subverting the medium in the process while extending and widening my compositions and the scalability of my images. I fragmented my images by ripping, tearing, and even burning my prints, then physically stitched, glued, and taped these prints and their Xerox copies together into cohesive wholes. In the late 80s, photo-based artists like David Hockney, the Starn Twins, and I demonstrated that these manipulations could be artful, genre-bending keys to interpreting and presenting subject matter, leading to the rise and sustained use of collaging techniques in photography.

Fragmentation frequently surfaces in my work, but my practice currently is not about constructing physical assemblages or augmenting with painting, objects, and fasteners like my early experiments or as many of my contemporaries practice today. As I continue to employ necessary stitching techniques in Photoshop that extend the image frame to striking and unconventional lengths, I take a more purist approach. My images remain solely in the realm of photography, placing me in a much different, more intense dialogue with imaging technologies, the environment, and the history of photography.

In-camera compositions push the boundaries of what the camera sensor can process, producing distorted, flattened, or flayed images that differ markedly in process, purpose, and possibility from traditional photography, photo-collaging, or even time-lapse and video techniques. The resulting images are playful, disarming, and at times, disorienting—yet they remain records of the environment we all share.

I challenge viewers' spatial awareness and encourage an experience and prolongance of their own peregrinations with perspectives calibrated and attuned to how we all act and interact within our shared environment—to find a more harmonious way of walking our individual paths.

Manspreading (2024)

CONTACT INFO

Eric P. Laverty
info@ericlaverty.com

SOCIAL

@thecatabolist

@ericlavertyphotography

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COPYRIGHT

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Photo courtesy Estate of Dolores T. Laverty (1968)