Image credit: Joe Laverty
Join photographer Joe Laverty to discuss his perspectives on Belfast heritage in ‘Still Standing’
Tour is outdoors and lasts approximately 1 hour. Comfortable shoes advised.
About the Artist and Exhibition:
‘Still Standing’ is a collaborative photography project shaped by Belfast Buildings Trust, Belfast Photo Festival and Joe Laverty as part of Creative Belfast, a partnership programme creating paid skills opportunities for young people across Belfast’s cultural and heritage sectors.
The project grew from a series of workshops and photographic walks in which Creative Belfast interns and older residents of the city spent time in conversation and made images together. In the process, they explored what heritage meant to them, not as something fixed or inherited whole, but as a living thing: the buildings, memories, stories and ways of life that people carry forward and make their own. The photographs that emerged from that process look closely at the city’s places as sites where memory, use, neglect and care have all left their mark.
Alongside leading the workshops, Laverty has developed his own photographic response to Belfast, bringing his long-standing interest in place, marginal spaces and the quiet tensions of the built environment into dialogue with the perspectives of participants across generations.
‘Still Standing’ asks what the city’s places mean to the people who know them, and what a closer look at those places might tell us about Belfast’s future as well as its past. It was co-commissioned by Belfast Buildings Trust and Belfast Photo Festival as part of their Creative Belfast partnership and to mark BBT’s 30th anniversary.
Artist Bio
Joe Laverty is an Irish photographic artist and filmmaker who completed an MFA in Photography at Ulster University, Belfast in 2022. His work explores place and our interaction with it, with a particular focus on marginal or overlooked spaces in urban and rural contexts. His practice examines extraction, landscape and historical narrative across Ireland. Laverty’s work has been exhibited in Dublin, London, Belfast, Galway, Navan and Tallinn, and published in Source, The Irish Times, Architects’ Journal, Dezeen, Wallpaper, Huck and The Guardian. He has recently been shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Irish Photo Prize and the AIB Portrait Prize.
About Belfast Buildings Trust:
Belfast Buildings Trust is a regeneration charity that uses and reuses what makes Belfast special. Its work shows how the city’s physical and cultural assets can help create a distinctive and connected Belfast, with a skilled local economy, resilient communities and greater confidence in what makes the city unique.
Tickets: Free
