• Photographs: Piotr Zbierski
• Texts: Piotr Zbierski
• Design: Piotr Zbierski / 19R
• French Translation: Clément Paradis
• 160 Pages
• 330 x 220 mm
• Soft Cover
• 40 color pictures and 100 black and white pictures
• French and English
• €49

Based on an intuitive, surreal narration the photographic series of Piotr Zbierski are constantly asking questions on relationships between nature and culture, between memory and narration, as well as between experience and story telling.

His photography pay also a tribute to the ceremonies and rituals of different communities where traditions are connecting the material reality and a wider spiritual understanding of the world. The works, very poetics and full of pure emotions, invites to meditation by plumbing the depths of the human soul and the mysteries of life and death.

“Nowadays more and more I think of photography as the river, on which both banks one stays simultaneously. The stories are on the first shore – well-constructed, thoughtful, intentional narratives enclosed in the form of books, exhibitions – in layouts to be seen. The spoken anecdotes, chemistry of emotions, edition works, knowledge and feelings.

But on the other bank there is a storehouse of photographic negatives and contact sheets. The whole thing together with emotional and factual memory. A solid maze of all possibilities and all that’s left untold. Here the story is open-ended, like the act of speaking, which only here has the chance to become similar to hearing.

Moreover, on the second shore photography is no longer only about love and sincerity, but also about time. This natural location seems to be no longer an intentional story, but rather the possibility. And maybe the closest one I know to visit the real past events and present longings and fantasies.  The possibility to dance with it.”

 

There are no words or pictures here that stay motionless in fact.
They rearrange themselves like things on a shelves.
Year by year, from everyday life to the passage of time.

I wish I could imagine their alternative axes.
Not really sure if they stay still, while flowing with river current.
Perhaps both. Time proves it doesn’t really matter.

But I can say I shiver sometimes imagining going out of that river,
Feeling the morning breeze
in still motionless mouths and faces.

Unknown what can survive on paper,
with probable eddies and floods.
Maybe they must leave to be saved.
The time shapes the space, parallel to the memory selfgrowth.

Let’s give the words some time to learn how to dance.
Tango that would be danced like salsa,
that would be danced like rumba,
that would be tapped by the ones who could wish
To set on fire the Tower of Babel
with the feelings dancing.

Piotr Zbierski, 2024.

Piotr Zbierski (b. 1987) studied photography at National Film School in Lodz Poland, where he earn PhD  degree in 2021. He presented his works in many countries like France, Poland, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia. As well as magazines (Shots Magazine, Ninja Mag, Archivo Zine, Die Nacht, Gup Magazine). In 2012 he won the prestigious prize for young photographer Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for his series “Pass by me”. His works has been shown at festival in Arles 2012, 2022 and are in collection of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts and Musée de l’Élysée. In 2016 he published his first book titled “Push the Sky Away” — the triptych of three series that he worked on in last nine years. In 2020 he published his second book called “Echoes Shades”.