Monochromatic tones, illusionism, and irrepressible tension… Polish photographer Piotr Zbierski presents his latest book, Solid Maze, in Arles. Published in France by the Marseille-based publishing house André Frère Éditions, the publication is accompanied by an exhibition consisting of a dance between suspended fragments and words, following its premiere in Poland at Galeria Poprzeczna. On this occasion, we had an exchange with the artist.
This book is your most intimate to date, bringing together photographs from a 20-year archive. Could you tell us how you got into photography?
From the very beginning, photography has been a very personal and intimate process for me. A process that lasts much longer than the act of taking a picture itself and has several dimensions. I choose photography quite by intuition, perhaps because it is a medium that brings you close to life and people. From a perspective of time I realise that I decided to dedicate myself to photography also because it has this amazing ability to communicate on the level of very different intervals of time then our senses, thoughts settled in the present has. My work after a while becomes a certain meditation on memory, time and emotions. I believe those aspects are both introspection and extraversion at the same time.
How did you select the 300 images that appear across its 160 pages?
The process of working on Solid Maze began around the time of the pandemic. I stopped traveling for a while, and I had been working non-stop for several years. You could say that it began in my kitchen, where a wall painted with magnetic paint served as a backdrop for me to find images found in dozens of boxes of negatives. I created two large-format installations presented at the Lodz Fotofestival and at an exhibition at Citadel Spandau in Berlin, based on this concept of editing on a magnetic wall. During this period, I looked through almost my entire archive, including previously unpublished images as well as those taken in recent years. For the first time, I included text in the book: personal notes that serve as letters, context for individual important moments, and an Ariadne’s thread that leads through the labyrinthine space I have constructed. Process finishes in November 2024, when the book was published by André Frère Editions.
What was your intention behind this project?
My aim was to create a bridge between the act of storytelling and experience. To suspend time and try to bring back the certain aura that I always feel watching unedited photographic materials.
In the introduction to your book, you wrote this beautiful sentence: “Nowadays more and more I think of photography as the river, on which banks one rests at the same time.” We’ll let readers discover the rest for themselves — but could you share how your artistic vision and practice have evolved over the years?
I think my approach to photography has always been characterized by emotion and pulsating intuition. I see photography as personal encounters with people and places I meet along the way. It has become my way of everyday life, a kind of projection of the inside out. I think photography is a medium that, in its documentary, informative space, obviously relies on the sense of sight, but also has the potential to speak through the superior sense of touch—this is what interests me most about it: the experience both during the photographic process and afterwards which is embedded on the other shore—related to time and memory.
What has remained unchanged is that my photographic language does not refer to a specific place and time. It is rather the search for a certain essence of both human nature and what remains constant, regardless of place and time.
Time and memory gently flow throughout Solid Maze. How did you approach and translate these two abstract and intimate notions into something palpable through your polysemic work?
Time felt to me like a place, a house in constant renovation and expansion. Both time and memory seemed vivid, like new rooms that opened or been discovered during that process. They had quite delicate structures and walls, and became my personal maze. I hope I managed to guide both myself and viewers through its corridors.
Noémie de Bellaigue
The Solid Maze exhibition, presented by An Inc. Gallery and curated by Kuba Szkudlarek, will be on view in Arles from July 7 to 19 at A Space For Photography. Solid Maze, the book, along with other publications by the photographer, are available on his website.
A Space For Photography
15, rue des Arènes
13200 Arles
