The Jumping Girl

• Prize
  Silver in People/Self-Portrait
• Photographer
  Réka Judit Jaksics
• Technical Info
  Leica, Natural Window Light, Digital, Color,
• Photo Date
  2023

A girl suspended in the air, between past and future, weightless. The jumping girl is a visual manifesto of the new Renaissance. She embodies departure, the lightness of being, and the raw, unadorned force of youth. In a single second, an entire feeling of life condenses. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she, too, stands for birth but her shell is empty space, her sea is light. While Venus is carried passively to shore, this girl brings herself into the world in a leap, detached from all grounding. The figure floats not only physically, but symbolically as a generation unwilling to be bound.

R.J. Jaksics, born in Budapest, is a trained concert cellist.? In 2021, she began photographing daily and intuitively, with a strong focus on self-portraits and emotional introspection.? She has participated in masterclasses with Antoine d’Agata and Roger Ballen. The Zurich-based artist Andreas Lutz remarked: “You are photographing your state of mind.” ?Sandro Kopp, renowned for his intimate portraiture, has been portraying her regularly for several years, creating new drawings each summer. The New York painter Daniel Maidman requested her photographs as reference material for his portraits.