The artist Vik Muniz is known for exploring the nature and techniques of photography and the way society reads and consumes photographic images. He does this by creating photography-inspired images using fleeting, unorthodox materials: chocolate syrup, dirt, paint chips, spaghetti--and ink--and then he takes photographs of them.
Which, to a kid making faces out of macaroni at preschool, makes perfect sense.
Christies is selling Pantheon I (American Men) Mr. Rogers (From Pictures of Ink) on July 10th in NYC. It's large, 40x30 inches, and is estimated to go for $8-12,000, which, in this freaked out art market, is a pretty affordable neighborhood. result: it sold for $18,000, including a 20% buyer's premium [christies.com]
Have you seen the vic muniz documentary "worst possible illusion"? I saw it at like three in the morning on KQED a few years ago, and it really made me fall in love with muniz. he has such a wonderful unpretentious energy.
I really love his portraits of sugar--- he made these extremely realistic portraits of the children of black sugarcane workers somewhere in the Caribbean I think, and then he displayed the photographs with little jars of the sugar that was used to create the portrait, with the original photos of the kid on the jar. in the documentary he spends all this time playing with the kids and talking about them in such an amazing way. I wish I could get a hold of it but I've only seen it on VHS.
(oh, and the photos of the ninjas in Juniper's bedroom were inspired by Muniz's portraits of gummy bears)
[a friend's brother produced it; I'll see if I can track it down. -ed.]