Vik Muniz rips up photography

By Georgia Grimond

“Garbage is fascinating,” says the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz. “I’m kind of addicted to it.” He knows his subject well. For three years he worked with a group of rubbish-pickers in a Rio de Janeiro favela, helping them to create giant self-portraits from the trash. The project culminated in an Oscar-nominated documentary, “Waste Land” (2010). “I had so many ideas being in among the garbage,” he goes on. “I started to see the back of my mind as a dump, then I began to think of what an image looked like inside there. It was fragmented, pulled together by myriad little pieces of references and bits of ideas.”

Since then Muniz has transferred the collage of his mind to paper. Using scraps and shreds of found images he has created several series of collages, which he then photographs and enlarges. One of these series, “Pictures of Magazines” (2012), is exactly that. Snippets of film stars, celebrities and models from magazine pages have been used to make a version of, say, a Stubbs zebra or an Edward Hopper townscape. “Postcards from Nowhere”, which he’s working on now, follows the same formula, but uses pieces of postcards to depict cities and seaside scenes. In them you can see shards of addresses handwritten on cards once sent across continents. Postage stamps litter the scenery, and you recognise the dazzling blue sky from every postcard you have ever seen. It is a demonstration of how little bits of each of our lives contribute to our collective cultural and visual memory.