Renowned Artist Sonya Dove and Photographer Nicolas Troncin Unveil the Hot Pursuit Collection

Hot Pursuit

Photographer Nicolas Troncin came up with an outrageous concept for a photo shoot, and Sonya Dove gave him carte blanche. Editor in Chief Marianne Dougherty has the lowdown.

Sonya Dove and her team drove from Santa Monica to El Mirage, a dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert outside Victorville, California, and set up camp at 5 a.m. so photographer Nicolas Troncin could get the first shot of the day just as the sun was peeking over the horizon. Troncin believes that the light at El Mirage is better than anywhere else on earth. Herb Ritts (who Toncin assisted for a few years in the early ’90s) shot Janet Jackson’s “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” video there in 1990, so Troncin knows what he’s talking about. “We took the crew up there in an RV so we could sleep during the day and shoot later when the sun was going down,” says Dove, who collaborated with Christine Consolino and Vanessa Salazar—they made the clothes for the shoot, which was inspired by the 1965 Italian science fiction film, La Deccima Vittima (The Tenth Victim). The film was based on a short story by Robert Sheckley set in the near future when big wars are avoided by letting people with violent tendencies go 10 rounds with each other in the Big Hunt. What unfolds is a cat-and-mouse game between hunter and prey that yields surprisingly unexpected results.