Liminal Traces and Spaces: Photography by Eric Laverty
Emergent and unfolding beyond the borders of classic, single-frame image capture, my recent photography exploits unique and sometimes novel scanning, panorama, and video sequencing techniques that position my action and interaction as the focus of extended, transitional performances. With my body both subject and medium, as well as vehicle, the extended duration/prolongation of my process activates, then fixes time, momentum, gesture, agency, and memory on the image sensor with a dynamic, contemporary cadence.
No longer a disembodied voyeur or passive observer, I favor a painter's action over a photographer's sessility, tracking my present(s)/presence as it is woven into the scene through a physicality antithetical to traditional image-making practices. In a fusion of street and forensic photography, selfie-ism, performance, and new approaches to time-lapse and stop-action photography, my sweeping gestures graze streets, sidewalks, signposts, walls, staircases, subways, trees, forests, parks, beaches, and crags.
Each scan is an attempt to fully capture phenomena, compositions, situations, and subjects by lengthening the duration the shutter is open thus, affecting how I engage the environment. Often, my attempts fail due to missteps or technological limitations. I adjust, learn, and invent alternative methods through which the interplay of non-traditional photographic dynamics stress and cajole the medium into new territory.
Though reminiscent of the pioneering movement studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Gjon Mili, Etienne-Jules Marey's kinetic investigations, Xavi Bou’s Ornithographies, or the topographical scans of Andreas Gefeller, I diverge from their precise, didactic methodologies. Instead, embracing their spirit of experimentation - with my shutter open to spontaneity, chance, and improvisation, I weave an expressionistic narrative that enmeshes vestiges of my present(s)/presence with the surrounding environment and terrain underfoot revealing the liminal trails, spaces, and fleeting cast of shadows that often escape human perception or attention.
Stairmaster/Stepmaster - New York (2024)
BIOGRAPHY
Eric Laverty (b. 1965, Detroit. MI) studied Painting with Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany (1991-93); Photography with Jim Dow at SFMA-Boston (1987-89); and Anthropology, Design, and History of Art & Architecture during his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1983-87) where his professor, Michael T. Taussig (Anthropology) and the work of Carlo Scarpa (Architecture) became enduring influences.
Laverty lives and works in both Brooklyn and Detroit. His photography, 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.
Harvard Union - Cambridge, MA (1989)
Throughout his artistic and commercial photography career, Laverty has focused on the built environment, coining the term Structural Catabolism to better describe his perspective of space, and the layering of time and material. Borrowed from from biology, Catabolism describes the breakdown of organic material during the metabolic process. In the context of the built environment, Laverty used it first to describe the processes involved in demolition while he was documenting the adaptive reuse of historic structures in New York and the surrounding region.
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. As Laverty elaborates, "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.”
McKim, Mead & White's Pennsylvania Railroad Power Station, LIC NY (2004)
While Laverty continues to explore Catabolism, he does so with a twist, challenging his artistic assumptions, spatial awareness, and cultural impact by creating new frameworks to extend and redefine the picture frame. He emphasizes abstraction and the formal elements of shape, line, color, and form while embracing movement, spontaneity, and improvisation to shift and jostle perception as he deconstructs the traditional structures and norms within photography.
Inverted Projections - New York (2020-2024)
As Laverty ventured out into the pandemic-emptied streets of 2020-21, he began questioning the influence of subject matter and process in his photography. With far fewer distractions, the streets revealed previously overlooked or uninteresting elements of the built environment. He viewed crosswalk stripes, street signage, bike paths, debris containment fields, and safety barriers as equally valid elements in his compositions as the structures he had been photographing. Inspired by his 2016-18 'Undercarriages Series' and the motivations behind the upturned paintings of Georg Baselitz, Laverty turned his images upside down, freeing the shapes, colors, and forms from their representational and recognizable conventions. This shift allowed him to invite comparison not only to Baselitz's post-war distopian landscape and the disorienting nature of the pandemic, but more importantly, helped him push forward, passed the past, out of the confines of single frame image capture and reconsider .
Laverty's frequent peregrinations and bike excursions throughout NYC and the region during this time prompted a need for greater flexibility and immediacy in his process. 'I spent so much time hopping on and off my 1976 Schwinn Continental to unpack, photograph, repack, and shoot that the convenience and viability of my iPhone was soon tested.' This shift opened new possibilities for Laverty, allowing him to explore panoramic settings that he could only partially replicate during post-processing.
Since his years at the SMFA-Boston, Laverty has been extending his picture frame with panoramic techniques. He physically stitched, glued, and taped his prints and Xerox copies together. In the late 80s, artists like David Hockney, photographers like the Starn Twins, and Laverty himself demonstrated that these manipulations could be artful, genre-bending keys to interpreting and presenting subject matter.
Fragmentation frequently surfaces in Laverty's work, but his practice is currently not about constructing assemblages with painting, objects, and fasteners like his early experimentations. As he continues to employ stitching techniques as necessary in Photoshop, his images remain solely in the realm of photography placing him in a much more intense dialogue with imaging technologies, laying bare the decisions and limitations of both his and of the technology he chooses to employ. His process cuts, slices, rips, and curls; fragments, twists, straightens, and unfurls, in-camera with limited post-capture editing beyond what transpires on the image sensor.
Laverty’s predominantly in-camera manipulations push the boundaries of what the camera sensor can process, producing distorted, flattened, or flayed images that differ markedly from traditional, time-lapse, or video techniques. The resulting images are playful, disarming, and at times, disorienting- yet are still, in their own way, records of the environment that envelops us all.
