Artwork: Matt Wisniewski for W Hotels.
If one photograph is good, it would reason that two are better. New York photographer Matt Wisniewski‘s stunning work is proof of this logic. His collage photography blends human silhouettes with unexpected landscapes to create beguiling images that force the viewer to pause and reconsider what he’s gazing upon.
In his “Head Full of Air” series, Wisniewski reimagines headshots with clouds. In “My Home is the Sea,” bodies of water merge with mysterious portraits. “Wreckage” is a study of catastrophic beauty while “Overgrown” places snarls of plants on what appear to be reluctant muses. “Body Image” gives nude models contorted, extraneous appendages. The photographs range from multicolored swirls to stark black-and-white, from textured to fluid, from dreamy to outré.
If all you knew of Wisniewski was his art, you probably wouldn’t guess his day job consists of writing software and building websites. “I very much enjoy the process of it,” he says of his tech-centric career, unaware of how rare it is to hear an artist gush about his 9-to-5. He considers his art a way of “being a little bit selfish and doing something that I think is really cool.”
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Wisniewski has a loose process, best described as “playing around and figuring out how things work.” He photographs people and landscapes, building up a hefty database of images. Though he relied on friends to be his models when he started out, now he finds people through Model Mayhem, a portfolio website that matches models with photographers. “I tend to go for people who are interested in starting out with modeling and don’t have a lot of experience,” he says. “I’m not looking for a lot of generically beautiful people; I just want a variety, a lot of different faces.”
Artwork: Detail from “Wet Canvas #2” by Matt Wisniewski.
For the nature shots, he travels at least once a year, his favorite destination being Iceland. “It’s a pretty popular photography destination,” he says. “The variety of photography you can get from there is astounding because there’s such a variety of landscapes. It felt like it was traveling to a different planet every day because you’d be in this lush, green area, and six hours away, it’s covered in snow.”
When he’s ready to create, Wisniewski peruses his database of photographs, searching for an interesting face or a particular quality in a landscape. After combining hundreds of images together, he’ll slowly whittle down the options based on which pairings make for the strongest concepts. After selecting the winning images–based more on shape than mood or color–he’ll clean up the lines. Along the way, if there’s something he wants to do that Photoshop can’t, he writes software for it through the program’s plug-in.
“I tend not to think about it when I’m creating the image,” he says. “I am pretty much just going for something that’s visually impressive. The difference in moods is more a result of my experiments with a lot of different things rather than something I’m directly going for.”
Artwork: Detail from “Fluid Dynamics #1” by Matt Wisniewski.
Wisniewski grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. His parents were encouraging of experimentation, and around age 7, he started using disposable cameras to capture unlikely items, like trash cans on vacation. Though he took a photography class while studying for a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, he is primarily self-taught. The collage photography he began doing around 2007 was simply the result of playing around with Photoshop.
Wisniewski’s early work was primarily black-and-white, not for an effect per se but because determining color combinations, and avoiding clashes, seemed like an unnecessary distraction. It was his “Experiments” series, a collection crafted from found images, that garnered him a captive audience. After posting the collage photography on Facebook, much to his friends’ delight, he created a Tumblr, and in less than a year, a blogger found the work and wrote about it. Word spread from there.
Fellow artists have since contacted him to propose collaborative collage photography while art directors have come out of the woodwork to commission images for specific projects. Among his collaborators thus far are fashion photographer Michele Laurita, creative director Derrick Leung, and stylist Anna Peftieva. One of Wisniewski’s illustrations accompanied a story by Charles Baxter in Harper’s and rock band Young the Giant’s Mind Over Matter album features one of his mash-ups.
Wisniewski sees collaborations not so much as money-making opportunities but as a chance to push beyond the usual boundaries of his solo art, like the time he created over a dozen murals for W Hotels’ gyms. “There’s an element of what I do there,” he says of the project, “but it’s also very different because you’re trying to cover an entire wall and fill all this space. That was an interesting challenge.”
Unlike most artists, Wisniewski says he is not interested in the traditional path of a gallery artist. “There’s no real novelty to me in being in a show,” he says. “If I got offered something really big, maybe I would consider it, but I tend to see a lot more exposure from someone posting on their website or art blog. It doesn’t seem super valuable [to have a show].”
Given how prolific he is, it seems surprising that Wisniewski doesn’t have aspirations to do photography full-time. In fact, “I definitely don’t want to do it full-time,” he says. “I see it as building up this collection of things I’m proud of making.”
