Vik Muniz: Seeing Is Believing by Muniz, Vik; Charles Ashley Stainback; Mark Alice Durant - 1998

Santa Fe, NM: Arena Editions, 1998. Hardcover. First edition, first printing. Fine hardcover in a Fine dust jacket with one short closed tear by the crown and curling at the top edges. All dust jackets are protected by a clear mylar cover. BOOKS SHIP THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY, WRAPPED IN PADDING, IN A BOX. Photographs by Vik Muniz; essays by Charles Ashley Stainback and Mark Alice Durant; interview with Muniz by Stainback. 164 pages; 75 full-page color plates; 9.75 x 12.25 inches. Exhibition history, bibliography. The artist's first monograph, published in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography, NYC; selected as one of the top ten photography books of 1998 by the New York Times Book Review. From the publisher: "Vik Muniz works with the syntax of photography, but his images are not simply photographic. Muniz's 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. 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."