Welcome to Prolongance, Notes on Photography, Perception, and Presence.
This is a space where I share what turns me on about photography and image-making. I will be presenting my own photographs along with the stories, questions, and tensions behind their creation, as a way to think through how images shape perception, presence, and attention.
My relationship with the medium has been complicated for as long as I can remember, shaped by a love/hate dichotomy you will soon come to understand. At times I am astounded: I think back to watching my first print almost magically appear in the developing tray and, decades later, to my first digital image, made in near-total darkness, appearing on the camera screen from light my eyes could not perceive; both were moments of awe and reverence. At other times I am dismayed by the camera’s ability to disrupt the flow of life, interrupting moments I wish I could simply have experienced. Rather than walk away from it, I stay inside the contradiction and more often than not find my footing again in the wonder.
This is also a space to explore how we are conditioned by technology, culture, and habit. How do images participate in that conditioning? How do we acknowledge that our view of the world is partial and unstable? I engage these questions every day and challenge myself to account for the many biases I carry as I experience the world.
I am a Brooklyn-based artist working with durational, performative photography that folds time and space through movement and gesture. I call this approach Prolongance, a continuous vantage point perspective. It evolved as a tool for working through grief and drift into a sustainable, surprising way to move through the world.
This Substack is being launched alongside my residency at Art Cake in Brooklyn, NY (@artcake_nyc). Many of the images, ideas, and questions I share here will grow directly out of that studio and from my studio-at-large: the streets, structures, and infrastructure of NYC, forest trails and crags of the Catskills, Long Island coastlines and beaches, airport concourses, and land yet to be traversed. Wherever I walk, whatever conditions present themselves, they are filtered through the perspective of Prolongance.
One thread I will follow with you is abstraction in photography. Much of my work blurs the line between representation and abstraction, where city streets fracture into disjointed streaks of light and shadow and familiar spaces become uncanny, yet almost unrecognizable landscapes. This is not just an aesthetic choice; it is a way to challenge perception and expectation. Abstraction invites viewers to slow down, question what they are seeing, and find their own meanings. Embracing abstraction can free photography from familiar conventions and open fresh ways of experiencing and understanding what we see.
Conditioning is another key theme. In an age flooded with images, most of us have been trained to see quickly, to expect certain compositions, skim a photograph, and move on. Here, the aim is to slow that reflex. I write as someone who works with images every day and is still learning how they do what they do. I will encourage a more mindful gaze, paying attention to how repetition, screens, and habit shape our visual field. I am interested in what changes, for myself and for others, when we sit with images that do not fit the usual mold instead of moving past them.
Going forward, you can expect a mix of short and longer entries. Some will dwell on a single photograph or sequence, tracking how it came into being and what it continues to ask of me. Others will step back to consider larger questions of perception, abstraction, and chance, or to place Prolongance in conversation with art history and the philosophy of photography. At times, I will also look closely at the work of other artists and photographers whose approaches unsettle perception in related ways, keeping my own work in dialogue rather than in isolation.
Whatever your motivation for opening your email a few times a month to read what follows, your thoughts and experiences are very much welcome: comments, questions, and responses are part of what this space is for. Whether you are a curator, collector, fellow photographer, artist, or simply someone curious about how images shape our understanding of reality, I am glad you are here.
If this sounds like a thoughtful way to spend a few minutes each week, consider subscribing.
My first essay will be hitting soon. In the meantime, I invite you to share this post with friends and colleagues. I also invite you to get acquainted with my work by visiting my website ericlaverty.com, and my Instagram page.
Thank you for reading, and welcome to Prolongance.
Eric