Many photographers excel at nude portraiture, but few are so dramatic and experimental as Maciek Jasik. His figures, awash in a swirling ocean of color and fog, are hyper-emotive without letting you see them clearly. His aesthetic isn't easily appreciated, but that's exactly the goal.
Jasik's signature style has appeared in many publications, including WIRED. For Bypassing the Rational, the photographer uses his illusive methods to blur the nude form. Shot in his Brooklyn studio, he utilizes an in-camera process to saturate the photos with deep, rich colors that make you linger with curiosity. He avoids green, which gives a sickly look, and favors red and blue. Jasik says the technique was inspired by painting.
“When I first started the color fields approach I had just been in the Post-Impressionist room in the National Gallery in London and I was really overwhelmed with the emotion the works created with just bare minimums of color and line and form,” he says. “So I wanted to see if I could replicate the same emotionality.”
Bypassing the Rational feels even more dramatic because of the strange contortions and floating bodies. Jasik asked his subjects to hop or jump, both because of the shapes it created and he found the it kept the models from focusing on the camera. That gave the portraits a more natural, spontaneous look. He also used movement to disrupt the way we've historically seen the body in dance and sculpture. Jasik feels classic art influences what we expect to see in a naked form.
“The question I was dealing with was, 'How do we create a starting point and a form that we’ve never been seen before?'" he said.
Jasik's subjects were professional models, friends, and people he met through Craigslist. To ensure the greatest diversity, he worked with men and women of differing body types, age, and ethnicity.
He says there is no way of knowing during a shoot which photos are keepers. He’s simply looking for movement that catches his eye while conveying a sense of what's going on while leaving the viewer with questions. “I’ve found that that you don’t need to see all the detail because our minds will fill in the details,” he said. “If you have a rough idea it’s almost more pleasing for the viewer to put the rest together on their own.”
