Prolongance - Changing the Contract

Photography by Eric Laverty

I grew up under the zealous snap of my mother’s shutter and blitz of her flash. Every occasion came with orders: hold still, look here, stop making faces, smile. The camera promised preservation and optimism, even as it insidiously seized control of the moment. Conversation froze, bodies tensed, feelings curdled. Life bent to the logic of framing and to her relentless direction. I loved what her photographs held, yet resented what they cost. I felt the control, the way process and image could dominate experience. The very attempt to save the moment kept us from fully being in it. I struggled to accept that tradeoff.

That tension stayed with me, and I carry it into every picture. It pushes me to ask what a photograph does to time, presence, agency, and trust, and how I might use a camera without freezing the room. I want to engage the medium without ambivalence or repeating that same unsettling posture of command and control.

I kept the camera but changed the contract. I now move. I move with the world, and sometimes against it, but I stay in motion. Prolongance is my way of refusing the fixed, obedient pose. I walk, pivot, and lean with the shutter open, letting each moment accumulate as I negotiate gait, balance, and direction, responding to an environment in flux and cues from technology. Each image emerges as a durational event rather than a single, decisive moment. I accept distortions, voids, and glitches instead of correcting them.

In a culture where the AI-driven camera phone has become the default instrument of self-presentation and expression, I am a beneficiary of its immediacy and frictionless access, yet I see how that same convenience can erode presence and turn attention toward performance. I use that same infrastructure to keep imperfection and instability visible. Prolongance tests whether the photographic process can return some of the presence it so often trades away in the name of immediacy.

I cannot claim to repair what the camera fractures. I can only practice accountability and presence, moving as I record, keeping the frame open, resisting the urge to perfect or control every detail, asking for reciprocity. What remains is a negotiated trace, where my body, the world, and the device meet without fully mastering one another.

Prolongance does not free me from photography’s economy of capture, it changes how I participate in it while acknowledging the friction and uncertainty that define my images.

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.

Before his five-year residency in Germany in the early 1990s, Laverty studied photography with Jim Dow at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Anthropology at the University of Michigan

Currently an Artist in Residence at Art Cake in Brooklyn, NY, Laverty lives and works in both Brooklyn and Detroit. 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.

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ESSAYS

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 continue 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 vision, 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

COPYRIGHT

All images and text Copyright © 1992-2026 Eric P. Laverty unless otherwise noted. All Rights Reserved.  Duplication, processing, distribution, or any form of commercialization of such material beyond the scope of the copyright law shall require the prior written consent of its respective author or creator. Downloads and copies of this site and any material contained within, are permitted only for private, non-commercial use with prior consent of Eric P. Laverty.

Photo courtesy Estate of Dolores T. Laverty (1968)