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 picturessly, punning documents that subvert photography by forcing it to record not the natural world but a fiction, a simulation. Munizs pictures are illusions that draw from the language of visual culture, but they twist and redefine our perception to both the commonplace and the fantastic. Munizs images humorously, as well as critically, challenge our abilities to discern fact from fiction, reality from illusion. Utilizing a panoply of unorthodox materialsgranulated sugar, tomato sauce, chocolate syrup, a 16,000-yard piece of sewing thread, and soilMuniz first creates an image, sculpturally manipulates it, then photographs it. Whether a portrait, a landscape, or an iconic image from history, Munizs images are never what! they seem. This book, the artist s first monograph, is produced in conjunction with Munizs one-person exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, opening September 1998.