dimensional one. The paradox was that these early
three-dimensional works incorporating photography
began to increasingly privilege the picture and its
capacity for illusion rather than sculpture’s material
presence. This was slowly arrived at by combining
photography with found objects that enabled the art
work to both literally and figuratively address the
world outside of it. Exemplary of this early work are
Tug of WarandTwo Nailsof 1989. InTug of War,a
real ‘‘rope’’ is the link between two photographs of
individuals each tugging the end of a rope. In ‘‘Two
Nails,’’ Muniz exploits the historical illusory device
oftromp l’oeilthrough the interplay of a photograph
of a piece of paper nailed to a wall that, in turn, is
itself nailed onto the wall by a real nail. This work
demonstrates what would remain a leitmotif in
Muniz’s later work: photography’s slippage between
its indexical quality, that is, its ability to record the
world, and its antithesis when it is embodied as a
real, tangible object. These early works also explore
the image as it shifts from perception to identifica-
tion within the viewer.
The Best of Life(1988–1990) is a group of pic-
tures of news events taken from the magazine that
gives the series its name. Muniz drew famous
photographs that recorded events such as the lone
Chinese man stopping tanks in Tiananman Square
and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon from
memory and then photographed these drawings.
By reconfiguring these images through his personal
recollection, Muniz explores the relationship
between our collective understanding of history
via images provided to us by the news media, and
our individual engagement with these images.The
Best of Lifeseries marks Muniz’s practice of con-
ceptual photography in which the idea that struc-
tures the work and resonates from it takes
precedent over the work’s formal qualities. How-
ever, by presenting his pictures as gelatin silver
prints that imbue them with the aesthetic of a
traditional photographic medium, Muniz becomes
concerned with the convergence of forms and
images that produce multi-layered narratives.
The Sugar Children (1996) further conveys
Muniz’s coupling of materials and meaning.The
Sugar Children features images of the sons and
daughters of impoverished sugar mill workers;
these images are rendered by Muniz with sugar on
black paper and then photographed. Although it is
a sweetener, within the context ofThe Sugar Chil-
dren,sugar becomes a bitter pill to swallow, pro-
ducing a scathing social commentary. This could
also be said of Muniz’s Pictures of Chocolate
(1997–1998), most notably his photograph of
Freud titledSigmund.
This photograph and others in the series—such as
(Milan) Last Supper— produce a visually poetic
work that powerfully evinces the marriage of form
and image. In(Milan) Last Supper, chocolate is an
analogue of the food pictured as being served during
Jesus Christ’s last supper that pushes the limits of the
visual experience of art through indexical associa-
tions. That is, in the same way that a photograph is
traditionally a recording of an event in the real
world, in(Milan) Last Supper,itservesasanindex
of something not usually the experiential province of
art: the sense of taste. Taste is also an element with
Sigmund, albeit couched in Freud’s own ideas about
psychosexual development. For chocolate now
alludes to both Freudian oral gratification or the
oral stage, and to the anal stage by way of the
picture’s viscosity alluding to excrement.
Muniz has also looked at photography’s own
history, producing the seriesEquivalents,a refer-
ence to Alfred Stieglitz’s famous series of skies and
clouds, as well as works in which he drew with dust
photographic documentations of installations by
famous Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd.
Muniz exploits the conceptual coupling of materi-
ality with narrative, or meaning and its vehicle of
articulation—be it drawing or photography or pic-
tures made with sugar, chocolate, thread, wire, or
dust—like no other contemporary photographer.
Muniz’s practice continues to engage formal and
conceptual arenas that push the boundaries of photo-
graphy in myriad directions, and his interest in emer-
ging technology and image-producing media will
surely secure his importance not only for twentieth-
century photography, but for twenty-first as well.
Rau ́lZamudio
Seealso:Appropriation; Brassaı ̈; Conceptual Photo-
graphy; Discursive Spaces; Formalism; Image The-
ory; Man Ray; Postmodernism; Representation;
Semiotics; Stieglitz, AlfredBiography
Born in 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil; lives and works in New
York City. Attended the FAAP (Fundac ̧ ao Armando
Alvares Penteado), where he studied advertising and
moved to New York in 1983. Began working in photo-
graphy in 1998 and shows his first photographs at Stux
Gallery in New York City under the title ofIndividualsin- Since then, has had numerous international exhibi-
tions in galleries, museums, fairs, and biennials.
Individual Exhibitions
1989 Stux Gallery; New York
1991 Meyers/Bloom Gallery; Santa MonicaMUNIZ, VIK