Jasper Soloff is the 24-year-old photographer capturing the cultural zeitgeist in all of its glory

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18th Sep 2019

Jasper Soloff’s portfolio reads like a well-curated guest list at a Hollywood affair or a carefully laboured seating chart of a fashion week show’s front row. Clad in splendid colour, Billie Eilish, Iggy Azalea and Tommy Dorfman (to name a few) spring out from the native New Yorker’s Instagram grid, captivating over 24,000 followers paying close attention to his growing body of work.

At 24, the Central Saint Martins graduate (Soloff left New York to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in London in 2016) is gaining momentum as one of the most promising young photographers in 2019. After reaching out to likeminded members of the queer community and people of colour upon his return home and shooting them for fun, Soloff fast-tracked his career when he became VFiles photographer of the year in 2018, precipitating features in Dazed, GQ, Them and Teen Vogue.

Leveraging his self-understanding as an outsider-yet-equal, Soloff has tapped into today’s mis- and underrepresented youth without the contrivances that can develop from a generational gap between photographer and talent. Instead, he is creating a new level playing field and empowering his subjects simultaneously (and selfishly, too, finding “a way to reconnect with my community”). In turn, he joins a class of contemporaries like Tyler Mitchell, Clare Gillen and Sarah Bahbah that are shaping a new frontier of storytelling with their singular shooting styles. Here, he chats to Vogue about returning a voice to minorities, championing sexual and gender fluidity and harnessing the positive power of youth no matter one’s age. 

“People are so layered and I think sometimes imagery can be glossed over,” explains Soloff over the phone to Vogue. “No matter who I’m shooting, I want them to look at that image and I want to see them.” 

Born of an avoidance to shoot anything but windows while at Central Saint Martins (“I felt so afraid to do what I wanted”), Soloff turned the camera on himself and began practicing portraiture, embracing the vulnerability of being a photographer’s subject head on. Then he approached others.

“I was feeling unwanted and alone and through Instagram I started reaching out to people that I thought were really interesting characters and had a lot of similarities to me. A lot of the queer community, a lot of people of colour,” he reflects of his entrée into photography. 

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Forging connections around shared experiences laid the groundwork for the images synonymous with the photographer now—images that are resonating with a roster of celebrity clients from Tove Lo to Todrick Hall. Reflecting on that time, Soloff says: “It was really, really special to work with people that weren’t necessarily in mainstream culture in the way they wanted to be represented… They were frustrated about the way they were being perceived.” 

Rather than harping on misconstruction in and outside of the media, Soloff (who shoots music videos on an Alexa Mini; photos on a Pentax 67)  now sets out to spotlight the youth of today in a way that feels optimistic, authentic and true to himself and whoever he’s shooting. And it’s working. “Honest expression of gender and sexuality is really, really important for me [when] working with artists both in the mainstream media but also artists that aren’t having as much of a voice,” he says. “People want youth culture in their work and in their campaigns,” he adds, rightfully questioning: “if they want an image that feels young, why just put us on your mood board?”

His sentiment underwrites a keen awareness of holes in the industry’s efforts to check certain boxes in order to keep up appearances, which is why he is unbending when it comes to fusing his fluid style with commercial briefs. “The same reason people are going to hire you for the job is the same reason why people aren’t,” he says. “There’s this voyeuristic feeling [in fashion photography] right now and that’s something I’m pretty in tune with. People just want to choose that one person that’s going to make their campaign diverse.” 

But for Soloff, he’s simply shooting people he sees mirrored in himself (windows of a different kind, perhaps), which is why the end result is so believable. 

“Being young is incredibly powerful,” he says, because and in spite of the fact that given his age, he’s disrupting the industry’s status quo. “The moment you start understanding that you’re not a victim in this and that your perspective is incredibly powerful… is the moment where those walls start breaking down.”