The camera lies, all the time. Lens distortions can be more or less radical. At their strongest, fish-eye lenses create extreme wide-angle images, even hemispherical panoramas, in which no line is straight and horizons loop across the picture. Long lenses squash and flatten apparent depth. Shooting through or into distorting surfaces will subvert reality further. Even your source photographs can be radically manipulated.
André Kertész made a seminal series of distorted nudes in the 1930s. He shot into convex, concave and wavy mirrors, finding extraordinary etiolations, swellings and three-headed women there. By cropping out the carnival ...
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