Push the Sky Away

Push the Sky Away is the debut monograph of the Polish photographer Piotr Zbierski, a triptych of interrelated series built around what he describes as an underlying structure to human existence, unchanged across cultures.

The book is organized in three sections: Dream of White Elephants, Love Has to Be Reinvented, and Stones Were Lost from the Base. It runs 238 pages, with two additional 16-page booklets inserted as dividers. Most of the 156 color and duotone photographs were made during travels through Eastern Europe and India. They favor chance encounters with strangers over documentary specificity, searching for gesture and ritual that Zbierski treats as shared inheritance rather than local custom. Patti Smith contributed a poem written in response to the pictures, and the critic Eleonora Jedlińska supplies an accompanying essay. André Frère Éditions (Marseille) published the book first, in French, in 2016; this Dewi Lewis edition brought it into English in 2017 and it was shortlisted for the Arles Author Book Award that year.

Zbierski (b. 1988, Poland) received the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award in 2012. He was included in the Regeneration3 exhibition at the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, in 2015. He has continued to self-publish photobooks through his own studio, including the Sun Eater trilogy and Solid Maze.