While scouring the internet some years back for obscure images of foods from the 1970s, Matthieu Nicol, a photo researcher in Paris, happened upon a trove of freely available pictures recently declassified by the U.S. Army.
Professionally photographed over a decades-long span ending in the 1990s, the images depicted people in uniforms for diverse military use.
Yet the original purpose of the photos can only be conjectured, as Mr. Nicol explained; despite his efforts, the Army would disclose next to nothing about the collection of some 14,100 images.
That did not deter Mr. Nicol, 46, a former editor at Le Monde, from undertaking a project aimed not only at vaulting the pictures out of archival obscurity but also making them a part of a broader discourse.
Noting how the clinical coolness of the photos, with their pale pastel backgrounds and affectless young subjects, resembled so much contemporary fashion photography, he assembled 350 of them in a new book, “Fashion Army.” It is at once a handsomely produced photo album and a metacommentary on what Bruno Ceschel, whose SPHB Editions imprint published the book, called “the interplay between military functionality and the fashion industry.”