Seeing Is Believing

Vik Muniz works with the syntax of photography, but his images are not simply photographic. As Vince Aletti has pointed out in the Village Voice, Muniz "has teased the medium mercilessly and with an infectious glee. He makes pictures of pictures — sly, punning documents that subvert photography by forcing it to record not the natural world but a fiction, a simulation". Muniz's pictures are illusions that draw from the language of visual culture, but they twist and redefine our perception of both the commonplace and the fantastic. Muniz's images humorously, as well as critically, challenge our abilities to discern fact from fiction, reality from illusion. Utilizing a panoply of unorthodox materials — granulated sugar, tomato sauce, chocolate syrup, a 16,000-yard piece of sewing thread, and soil — Muniz first creates an image, sculpturally manipulates it, then photographs it. Whether a portrait, a landscape, or an iconic image from history, Muniz's images are never what they seem. This book, the artist's first monograph, was produced in conjunction with Muniz's one-person traveling exhibition.