Vik Muniz, Double Mona Lisa (Peanut butter and Jelly), from the series After Warhol, 1999 © Vik Muniz/Galerie Xippas, Paris
Brazilian artist Vik Muniz isn’t like most photographers, who aim to capture extraordinary moments as they appear in real life. He’s known for making iconic images out of wacky materials, like the Mona Lisa rendered in peanut butter and jelly or Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére collaged from magazine clippings, then photographing the end product. It’s artwork Muniz describes as “photographic delusions” that playfully toy with our sensory memories and inspire a sense of wonder.
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His work can be amusing as well as poignant, as noted in his series Pictures of Garbage from the award-winning documentary Waste Land (2010), which follows Muniz as he works with the catadores, or trash pickers, of Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre dump near Rio de Janeiro that was the world’s biggest landfill before it closed in 2012. Muniz turned their trash into large-scale photographic portraits of the pickers, which he then sold at auction for $250,000, and gave the bulk of the proceeds back to the catadores union to build a library and retrain workers once the landfill closed.
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A retrospective of Muniz’s massively diverse artwork, Vik Muniz: Photography and the Rebirth of Wonder , just opened at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. The exhibition and an accompanying monograph, Vik Muniz (Prestel), celebrate the dazzling marvels Muniz’ constructs out of things like diamonds, toys, chocolate syrup, and sand.
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VICE caught up with Muniz while the artist was traveling in Italy to chat about how technology has liberated photography and how unexpected images can subvert and change the way we see the world.
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Marlene Dietrich, from the series Pictures of Diamonds, 2004. Digital C print, 65.2 x 51.6 x 1.9 inches © Vik Muniz/Galerie Xippas, Paris