Bypassing the Rational, and Letting Identity Disappear on Purpose
Shoot The Frame 2025 Annual Awards (Photo Essay Winner) — A narrative interview with Maciek Jasik on colour, motion, and a photographic world designed to dissolve the myth that clarity equals truth.
Maciek Jasik’s Photo Essay winning project, Bypassing the Rational, begins with a rejection. Not of photography, but of one of its most seductive myths: that the clearer the portrait, the closer we come to a person’s true identity. Selected as the Photo Essay Winner in the Shoot The Frame 2025 Annual Awards, Jasik’s work is built to disrupt that certainty from the first frame.
“Photography fooled us into thinking that portraying someone clearly and realistically brought us closer to who they are,” he says. “I reject that notion entirely.” Instead, he enters a world where identity is deliberately submerged into colour and movement, where the figure becomes “pronounced but unpronounceable.” The work is not trying to clarify the subject. It is trying to dissolve the idea that clarity is truth.
Jasik wants the viewer to feel destabilised. Not delighted, not soothed. Confused, and slightly suspicious of the image itself. “I hope they are confused,” he says. “I want it to be unclear how this could have been created. How the person came to be in such a position.” Confusion, in this context, is not a trick. It is a demand. He wants people to expect more from images.
The seed of the project arrived far from a studio. Jasik was working as a lighting technician for photographers. On a trip to London, he visited the National Gallery and became transfixed by post-Impressionist paintings that were powerful and distinct with only colour and hints of shape. He wondered whether he could create photographs based on movement and colour. He started with faces, then moved to bodies.
His process is about building a world with rules. Before shooting, it is about establishing the parameters of the project. While shooting, he works within the world he has created, without departing and without repeating himself. In editing, he refines the final image, but changes very little. The work is not rescued in post. It is built in-camera, inside the constraints he chooses.
Colour is the engine and the hardest problem. Jasik has never taken a colour theory class, so he relies on instinct. “The most intentional choice was always the colour,” he says. At first, he did not even think about why certain colours worked. Over time, he began to see patterns, which both helped and made him prone to formulas. The solution was not to become more rigid, but to stay committed to experimentation.
Sometimes the most difficult element is the colour gradient itself. He works intuitively, not through a formula, and it can take time to find combinations that feel compelling. Motion is equally unpredictable. With some people, a distinct shape comes easily. With others, you play a subtle game to get there, repeating sequences until the right one clicks. He is clear about one thing he does not want: images that read as dance. Dancers can be the best or the worst, he says, because they repeat recognisable motions. The pictures look like dancing. “Which I can’t stand.” He wants the figure, the shape, to feel unrelated to anything the viewer has seen before.
Even the smallest detail becomes decisive. Jasik often focuses on hands. What are they doing? Are they distracting? Are they aligned with the movement of the figure? In a project built on blur, colour, and partial recognition, a hand can anchor identity too clearly, or disrupt the internal logic of the frame.
The relationship with subjects is deliberately broad. The person he photographs could be a stranger, a friend, a paid model, a sex worker recommended by another sex worker, or someone who answered a Craigslist ad. What binds them is not biography. It is the time they share. “Even if you don’t know them,” he says, “you share a unique set of time that no one else will ever have access to.” He describes the shoots as collaborative, consent-based, and appreciative. He does not ask anyone to do something he would not do himself, and he asks permission before requesting movements or expressions.
Within a few shoots, the project surprised him. He realised he had stumbled onto something powerful, making images outside his own imagination. But early luck comes with pressure. Sometimes you do not get the magical shot. You get something that seems good, but does not carry emotional weight. A few flat sessions can trigger doubt. His response is to re-examine what worked before and go back in, staying present. Do not let pessimistic voices interfere.
As a photo essay, the cohesion comes from theme and mood. You are always entering the same world, even if it feels like a different level or room. Reality is imperceptible or confusing. Colour is entrancing, but motion is unfamiliar. And the scale is immense. Jasik has over 100 final images and thousands of outtakes. The combinations are endless.
Underneath it all is a worldview: not only is reality not what it seems, but you will never fully know what it is, and that is beautiful. Conversely, society is a construct. And so is photography. Jasik continues to explore colour and perception in a landscape project called The World with Us. He recently photographed an assignment for The New York Times Magazine, casting the models himself and eliciting strong emotional reactions within his parallel world of colour.
Asked to describe his work in three words, he offers a phrase that functions like a doorway into the whole project: unreal fever dream.
