Fall exhibitions on view through January 10, Learn More. He then photographed his drawings and kept only the photographs, thereby establishing his signature working style. To make the series Pictures of Garbage, Muniz spent two years working with garbage pickers at Jardim Gramacho, an open air dump site near Rio.
He photographed several of the pickers as subjects of classical portraits, with the background details supplied by the garbage they scavenged. This effort was captured in the documentary Waste Land, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Mary O'Donnell Hulme.
Sort by. Year Before After All Years. Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer. New York: Aperture, Natura Pictrix: Essays and Interviews on Photography. New York: Edgewise Press, Back to Top Back to Top.
X Newsletter Signup. Please enter a valid email address. Thank you for subscribing! As Holger Birkholz points out, "It is a method that requires careful planning and a considerable capacity for abstraction. The original must be analyzed and transferred to an entirely different medium, in this case from a photograph to a kind of silhouette. During this transfer, the medium of the model and that of its reproduction enter into a relationship that incorporates the content of both. The medium of the silhouette is often considered a precursor to photography, as it, too, uses light to produce an image.
Thus it verges on the ironic that the silhouettes so painstakingly produced by Muniz serve merely as the subject for photographs and are then destroyed. In the end, the enlarged photograph is all that remains. The photographs in "Pictures of Paper" are lit from the side so that the bas-relief-like layers of paper are clearly discernible upon closer inspection.
However, when viewed from a distance it appears to be a two-dimensional medium, albeit one in which the illusion of spatial depth approaches perfection. We will be showing pieces from four bodies of work on both levels of the galleries at Checkpoint Charlie. He then photographs these perishable reconstructions and throws them away, keeping only the photograph. This method of remaking and then preserving the chosen images helps bring together different times and attributes.
The photographic record, on the other hand, is instantaneous. It does not require any skill and it takes place at the exact moment when the camera shutter blocks, for the artist, the vision of the image he has created. By means of this operation both complex and candid, Muniz weakens the strong connection that one would expect to exist between the photographs and the images that inspired them, turning photography into a more opaque medium, forcing the observer to take more time to define what exactly is being represented.
Modifying what is usually expected from photography — generally seen as merely denotative — Muniz is really inducing our gaze to distance itself, for at least a little while, from the referents described in the photographs.
He is suggesting in these remade images new meanings and a distinct rhetoric. By associating the content of the chosen images with the symbolic and formal properties of the processes and materials with which he reproduces them — and then making a photographic record of this tense union — Muniz is creating and perpetuating something that formerly did not exist.
And even if the nature of the materials used to recreate these images sometimes makes them comic or declassifies them, the often transient nature of these substances ends up affirming, by contrast, the integrity of the referents that Muniz has used. It is necessary to explain exactly what kind of illusionist Vik Muniz is. Yet there are no set rules to create this synergistic meeting between message and medium.
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