Florence Henri was initially a student of music and painting, before turning to photography. She enrolled at the Bauhaus, now in Dessau, in 1927, where she studied under László Moholy-Nagy. She began to explore experimental photographic techniques such as photograms, photomontages and multiple exposures. Her work often incorporated extreme perspective views and the use of mirrors and prisms. She played with vantage points in her work, and often created compositions where it was difficult to distinguish the real object from its mirror image. Henri also set up a successful studio for advertising photography in Paris and worked for magazines such as Vogue and Art et Decoration.

This photograph is from Henri’s series Mirror Compositions, in which she uses mirrors to frame, isolate and duplicate her subject matter whilst simultaneously distorting space. In this image it is not clear which fruit is a reflection and which one fruit is the original object.