In a sense, each of us begins and ends his life from the primordial. Starting with the sense of touch, which places us within reality, allowing us to feel our feet, and moving on to those common elements of nature, which are so widely shared and experienced. The natural world offers a balance and collaboration which can appear contrary to the notion of human development and the progress of civilisation.

For me photography is a sensual meeting with people

It’s a medium that allows you to get closer to people and it is probably for this reason that I chose photography. A major objective of my work is to reach through to the essence of human emotions. To show a man in the way he has been created, a man from a primeval village.

There is also the question of variation and diversity, the roots of which are both familial and spiritual. I’m sure you have seen your own face reflected in the face of your grandfather or of another family member, either from a photograph or in their presence. Descendants are after all biological variations of their ancestors.

This becomes increasingly complex as we reach further and further into a past which we haven’t experienced with our own senses. The answer, for me, is in an instinctive reaction to natural, social and psychological elements: elements such as pain, happiness, ecstasy. Can these be tamed within an image? Yes, but only within the context of life.

What interests me most in this series are the traces, the threads, of what preceded the image. It is an archaeology understood not as a linear reconstruction but as the co-existence of periods of time, a dialogue between the time of the mind and the more common one, a relationship with the past. Every cultural and religious system, in its early stages, was based on the observation of nature and of the forces acting on it. We live in specific times, in which we have often lost contact with our linguistic, logical, cultural or spiritual roots. They are hidden somewhere behind the curtain or superseded by modern hybrids. Although they still breathe in the present, they are entirely covered with the dust of their ancestors.

My interest is in how such spaces overlap or have become eroded, to draw out the structure and interrogate its origins. It exists in the present, but it is also the result of anthropological travel through the ages. I chose to photograph places that were important to earlier civilisations, such as the medieval astronomical observatory in Lithuania or things that were created by natural forces without any human intervention. I also photographed rituals which are characteristic of many cultures and faiths, concentrating mainly on the emotions of the believers. I try to avoid the mystical. Personally I find it too vague – though fact can also obscure. I am searching in between.

I generally use techniques of instant pictures, and allow the image to be distorted and destroyed by temperature, and by the natural conditions of the location itself. What is a priority for me is that nature becomes a co-creator of the aesthetic of the images.

All the funds raised with the campaign will help me to finance the last costs of production of the book, introligatory, bindery service as well as production of the exhibition set that will be based on the pictures in the book.

Technical information

Push the sky away 

Size: 210x280mm

Pages: 260

Hard-cover

Editions: 

english language edition: Dewi Lewis Publishing

french language edition: Andre Frere Editions

polish language edition: Wydawnictwo PWSFTviT

Book Design: Bartłomiej Talaga, Piotr Zbierski