Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a little bit more intention, you see it.
Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce’s view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.
I photograph what I paint and I paint what I can photograph. You have to be Man Ray to make good art based on principles.
A lot of what happens in my work is at the level of recognition. The viewer is in front of something that either is an archetype or an icon, recognized to a point of exhaustion. Images of the Virgin and the baby Jesus say a lot about dress code, how wealth was distributed, how politics worked. People today can bypass the subject matter, because they know it so well. They’re able to see what’s around it.
The first century of photography was all about making a decent picture. After that, it was mostly about making something look decent or indecent
in a picture.
Once I thought I could duplicate the dot pattern of a billboard with M&M's. I almost died of nervous exhaustion. Live ants, rubber bands, black beans, chains, electric sparks, magnets, oil, milk—you name it, I’ve tried a lot of things but only succeed with a few.
In photography, the theater of consumption assumes yet another curious form: whenever someone buys a picture, he or she is subliminally buying part of the
soul of the picture’s subject. We buy a picture of a thing, just for the sensation of owning a remotely detached and mediated part of that thing.
Photography does not reveal the world as a whole, but a carefully edited version of it. It’s not linked to truth in any circumstance, because it’s bound to an opinion, making it more human than mechanical.
