Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]

 My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in a book was, “Wow, what a great photograph!” I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture. 
 If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it. 
 Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies. 
 Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century. 
 Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs. 
 I have failed so much that I now stand on failure itself. It has become my work place and where I harvest my best ideas. 
 Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force. 
 I hate to say I’m a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I’m a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it’s good when you’re confused about what you are; it means you haven’t defined yourself as an artist yet. 
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