Seeing Is Believing [Hardcover]

Charles Ashley Stainback (Author), Vik Muniz (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 1899 | ISBN-10: 1892041006 | ISBN-13: 978-1892041005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Best described as an artist who uses a camera, Vik Muniz blurs the lines between painting, sculpture, and photography. He has made a number of different series of photographs in which he constructs images--often portraits--out of materials such as sugar, chocolate syrup, and thread. In another series, he drew famous images (using his aforementioned nontraditional media), like the photograph of Neil Armstrong on the moon, from memory. Muniz plays freely in the field of representation. And through his work, viewers witness the complicated separation between a real image that seems definitely to exist somewhere, and the means by which Muniz achieves a representation of that image--first re-creating it, then making a photograph. He writes that "illusion becomes a way to improve our understanding of what reality is and humor becomes a subject for serious investigation." By setting up images that aim to unsettle viewers' perceptual faculties as a way of expanding understanding, and stimulating discovery, Muniz takes part in a trend in image-making that includes artists such as Gerhard Richter, Richard Artschwager, and Thomas Demand.

Published alongside his solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, Seeing Is Believing is the first monograph on Vik Muniz. The reproduction of the images on heavy, creamy paper is of exceptional quality, indicative of its publisher, Arena Editions. And the book includes two essays, one by Charles Ashley Stainback and the other by Mark Alice Durant, as well as a dialogue between Muniz and Stainback. --Loren E. Baldwin

Review

...this elegant survey of his work of the past 10 years offers evidence that he is no flash in the pan. -- The New York Times Book Review, Andy Grundberg

Mr. Muniz dances the rhumba with visual perception and temporarily folls the viewer into thinking it's the samba. In the book he says: "I have neither the interest nor the means to produce illusions that expand the concept of what an illusion is-George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are doing that for us . . .I want to make the worst possible illusion that will still fool the eyes of the average person." -- New York Times, September 25, 1998

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 164 pages
• Publisher: Arena Editions (December 30, 1899)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1892041006
• ISBN-13: 978-1892041005
• Product Dimensions: 13 x 9.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,713,092 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seeing is Believing, June 21, 2000

By 

Anthony Kirwan (Buffalo, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seeing Is Believing (Hardcover)

Through playfullness, ambiguity, and our trust in photography as a purveyor of ultimate truth, Muniz's photographs question not only the nature of photographic reality but the reality of images themselves. The commentary in the book from co-authors and artist is excellent and further helps in understanding the work and the conceptual ideas behind it. Muniz's photographs are not only conceptually intriguing but are also aesthetically just beautiful to look at as well. Most of the plates are full page reproductions with a few smaller plates from earlier work. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in photography.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Or not believing, October 4, 2001

By 

W. Flesch (arlington, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seeing Is Believing (Hardcover)

This book is a fantastic documentation of some of Muniz' work (before his recent piece in the Whitney, which enlarges photographs of reproductions in dust of some major Whitney installations and their galleries). Most amazing, for me, were the thread-versions of well-known drawings, where thread substitutes for ink; and the reproductions from memory of a series of famous photos -- something like a graphic version of Sophie Calle's display of the Gardner museum guards' descriptions of the stolen paintings. Alas that it should be so hard to find.