NEW YORK (Modern Painters)—In summer 2005 Republican senator Chuck Hagel was quoted in the New York Times as saying the United States was losing “the war of images.” Whether or not Hagel knowingly lifted the evocative phrase from political blogger Juan Cole is a matter for debate; however, one could also argue that such a war has been waged since photography’s nascence.

Look no further than William H. Mumler’s Civil War-era images of mourners “posing” with the shimmering apparitions of deceased loved ones for proof that photos have long been used to manipulate popular conceptions of reality.

Yet Hagel’s lament implicitly acknowledges what has come to be a paradoxical truism of the current century: whereas people were once easily duped by photographic information, today it is assumed to be constructed, and still it continues to represent “truth.”

Eileen Quinlan’s “Smoke & Mirrors” series, a body of photos she’s pursued with singular focus since 2004, is an ongoing investigation of photographic veracity. Using what she calls “the most common tricks of the commercial studio trade,” Quinlan photographs smoke reflected in arrangements of tiled mirrors, all lit by a strobe light and colored by reflections bouncing off materials like mylar or foil.

The hundreds of extant images from the series are disorienting and hallucinatory, so divorced from perceptual regularity that they’re hard to comprehend visually. Hers are photographs around which no story can be constructed, and their total non-narrativity carries the aura of superior objectivity—images exempt from the war of images.

In their austere impenetrability, the “Smoke and Mirrors” photos project otherworldly authority, not unlike the sinister computer-autocrat Alpha 60 from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

A self-described “process artist,” Quinlan always uses the same set of materials and never shoots digitally; any “effects” (coloration, lighting, reflections) are a product of the set-up.

Digital photographs, which usually pass through (or never leave) a computer, connote immanent malleability. A photo for which a negative exists implies a definitive trace—proof.

Controlling the conditions of the environment where the “Smoke & Mirrors” images are shot is paramount to Quinlan, but there’s always a variable factor: the smoke itself. The appearance of smoke can never be totally controlled and is dependent on environmental factors that can’t be duplicated.

The look of the photos has changed substantively since Quinlan began the series in 2004 while in graduate school at Columbia University. Although her fascination with photography’s link to the paranormal spurred the series, Quinlan’s motivation to expound narrative has waned.

Earlier pieces in the sequence are more panoramic, prioritizing the smoke; they contain more drama, more potential narrative than the newer pieces, which are sparer and increasingly abstract. Smoke & Mirrors #123, an exemplary 2006 piece, is mostly negative space, but a corner of a mirror tile reflects a glowing razor of light, illuminating a sparse puff of smoke that’s either billowing in the foreground or reflected somewhere in Quinlan’s walls of mirrors.

The “spooky” implications of her earlier photos have morphed into vortexes of perceptual confusion, where a ray of light beckons with the familiar sight of something “real” only to be revealed as just a reflection.

In their anti-narrativity Quinlan’s new photos are as much about the nature of image-making and how images are used as they are about what they actually depict, and she cites Barbara Kasten and Jan Groover—photographers whose subject was photography—as influences.

Perhaps as a reminder that a photo is a multiple, not something invested with the sanctity of uniqueness, she hung Smoke & Mirrors #24A’s whole edition of six in her recent show at Sutton Lane in London, with the pieces available for sale only as a unit. Such medium-referentiality smacks of modernism, and there’s an undeniably Constructivist look to some of the “Smoke & Mirrors” photos (#125 could pass as something from Liubov Popova’s playbook).