Nicolas Monjo

As a New York fashion photographer and magazine publisher I spent my earliest years focusing on direct and accurate depictions of models and apparel. Garment industry customers wanted me to show the key details of the garments accurately and make everything look as conventionally attractive as possible. I produced many millions of images over three decades under these conventions.

But few of the objects I started to make in the mid 1990’s used a camera in an opposite manner, to search for something unpredictable. I photograph the reflections ­­— in distorted mirrored surfaces — of humans or found items. This is a mechanical process, images of which I see, and choose to capture or not, as they appear in the camera viewfinder. This tool twists the results off into unpredictable and unexpected directions. It is not provided to me by AI.

In one recent series, Assassins, I start with early found photographs of killers (before they kill), the reflections of which I then photograph ­­— in a distorted mirrored surface. The results explore whether there was something there, back then, to suggest future behavior.

For “Lance n.5” I used the same process to examine the cover of Texas Monthly from July 2001, which included an heroic photo o...

Columbia College, New York