Steve Pyke

Steve Pyke is a renowned photographer known for his intimate and intense black-and-white portraits of extraordinary thinkers, creators, and artists of our time. Pyke created his first photographs in Ireland in 1980 and has maintained a deep, ongoing association with a place central to the development of his artistic practice. Widely hailed as a classic landmark‘photographic novel’ I Could Read the Sky, created with the writer Timothy O’Grady was first published in 1997. In 2024 it was reissued in a new, expanded edition by Unbound.

Pyke has spent the last 40 years seeing the world through a creative lens. Born in Leicester, UK, Pyke resided in London and NYC for many years. Steve now lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana and continues to work in Ireland and internationally. His work has been exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, Japan, Mexico and the US and is held in many permanent collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, the V&A in London, New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern art (MOMA), New York. A selection of works from his I Could Read the Sky series was acquired in 2024 for the Photo Museum Ireland collection. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Photo Museum Ireland in 2025.

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Steve Pyke's Book

I Could Read the Sky Timothy O'Grady (author), Steve Pyke (photographer)

I Could Read the Sky by Steve Pyke and Timothy O’Grady

About the book

I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O’Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle of this century. Now at its end, he finds himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland and his decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields and on the building sites of England. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country and the seascapes, the bars and the boxing booths, the music he played, and the woman he loved.

An old man lies alone and sleepless in London. Before dawn he is taken by an image from his childhood in the West of Ireland, and begins to remember a migrant’s life. Haunted by the faces and the land he left behind, he calls forth the bars and boxing booths of England, the potato fields and building sites, the music he played and the woman he loved.

Timothy O’Grady’s tender, vivid prose and Steve Pyke’s starkly beautiful photographs combine to make a unique work of fiction, an act of remembering suffused with loss, defiance and an unforgettable loveliness. An Irish life with echoes of the lives of unregarded migrant workers everywhere. Since it was first published in 1997, I Could Read the Sky has achieved the status of a classic.