Monaris, the professional name of Paola Franqui, is a Puerto Rico-born, New Jersey-based photographer known for cinematic street photography that renders fleeting urban moments with painterly, atmospheric intensity.,Influenced by Fred Herzog, Saul Leiter and Vivian Maier, she creates her signature look through careful framing, reflections, shadows and color-graded post-production.
Franqui began photographing in 2014 after joining a street photography group that walked New York City, and left her full-time job in 2017 to pursue photography professionally.,In April 2021 her friend, fellow photographer Dave Krugman, introduced her to NFTs, and she minted her first piece, Until We Meet Again, a window-reflection image juxtaposing three figures at different stages of life. That year she published her first photobook, Momentos, using Until We Meet Again as its cover with a foreword by Krugman, and minted the first 30 images of Collecting Hands, a series exploring what people's hands hold and reveal.
Setanta later published Collecting Hands as her second photobook, following her debut Momentos, again focused on the human hand: fingers curled around a paper roll, a lunchbox handle, a shopping bag.She has also released NYC Underground Stories, a 51-image series portraying New York City subway commuters, and contributed to The Seven Collection, a joint project between TIME and Deepak Chopra for which she reimagined the cover of Chopra's book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
Monaris is a Sony and Adobe Lightroom ambassador and has worked as a stills photographer for filmmaker David Fincher on his 2023 film The Killer.,Her photo book Whispers of Ladakh, printed using a silver halide process, was exhibited at Printique's 19th Street Gallery in New York.
