After September 11, Kerry Skarbakka began throwing himself off of things: trees, ladders, mountains, fences, staircases. Somebody, often his girlfriend, would take the picture at an appointed moment or when he yelled "now!" and he would repeat the process about 10 times to get the image he wanted. In every photograph, whether Skarbakka's legs are splayed in resistant desperation or whether his body has gone peacefully slack in freefall, the question arises of what happened in the end, after he hit the ground. Their display as a series—called The Struggle to Right Oneself, at Lawrimore Project this month—puts the question to rest. Obviously, each time he has lived to fall another day.

Skarbakka became infamous last year for a performance involving storyboarding, staging, and photographing a fall from the top of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. A New York Daily News columnist accused Skarbakka, who lives in Brooklyn, of exploiting the World Trade Center jumpers. New York Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg denounced him. He got death threats.

Mixing action movies, extreme sports, and disaster photography is risky, no question. And by throwing his own body around, he is placing himself at the center of a disaster. Is this empathy, narcissism, or the cooler operation of allegory? Skarbakka has it all three ways in the photographs. He almost never shows his face, and his clothes and hair change. He is somebody only in relation to the disaster, only in the way his body responds to the particular circumstances of each fall.

Each photograph has its own emotional register—in one, the artist, visibly spooked, leans off a train trestle. (He tied a rope to himself, which he later Photoshopped out, and pushed the camera out onto one of the trestle's bars so the uneasy perspective is from the crevasse.) But when the images are seen in a row, they become a single continuous disaster, like a global newsfeed. They are like the installation by the artist Trimpin that plays music every time an earthquake over 5.0 on the Richter scale is recorded: It plays all day long.

Skarbakka is combining backgrounds in sculpture, theater, martial arts, and rock climbing—and the public fall in Chicago simply had too much theater in it. The artist seems shell-shocked by the response, and by his looping personal relationship with disasters. He shot a porch fall in Chicago shortly before the Chicago porch collapse that killed 13 in 2003; he won a grant to make underwater images based on the aggressiveness of water (after being evacuated during the Prague floods of 2002) shortly before the tsunami. New Orleans followed. In the series Fluid, Skarbakka varies his formula and takes approaches from romantic to forensic, depicting a frozen lungful of exhaled bubbles or his limp body in a tangle of mossy branches. He intended these as warnings about global warming but they came too late. Now they are portraits of a man drowning in disaster.