Photo of the week: get your head around this strangely unsettling image

Jan Cieślikiewicz asks questions about the human need for explanation and truth.

“I took it on a trip to Iceland. It’s tricky photographing there because the country has been photographed a lot and it’s easy to fall into clichés. When I arrived, I spent a few very pleasant days exploring the more accessible parts of the island, then got to work and went off the beaten path. That’s when I came across this site,” Cieślikiewicz describes.

The fact that the photograph was taken in Iceland is incidental to Null Hypothesis, the series the image is part of. The body of work takes its name from an analytical research method often used in psychology and physics, along with other fields, to rule out random results. However, Cieślikiewicz is drawn to randomness, oddities in life that defy logical reasoning.

“This image is quite a good example of my style,” the photographer says. It is a strangely unsettling image. Showing a figure drowning in murky waters, it plays with the our desire for depth and truth. In a time of Donald Trump and “post-truth”, it seems only appropriate that Cieślikiewicz is wanting to draw attention to the bizarre and unexplainable.

“History is full of dead truths, and people that fought for them. Religions, as timeless as they seem, have their beginning and will one day see an end. In science, basic concepts like time and space take on new meanings with each generation. Some things are just not to be resolved,” he writes in his artistic statement.