Narcissus,

2005

As their collective title implies, the photographs in the series <em>Pictures of Junk</em> portray metal detritus on the floor of Muniz’s workspace in Rio de Janeiro. Yet the pictures also (not incongruously, although one might expect so) share an iconographic lineage with old master narrative paintings of the pagan pantheon. Muniz perched with his view camera in a cherry picker high above the floor, and used a laser pointer to direct a studio staff composed of local teenagers. Here, they reconfigured the trash into the form of Caravaggio’s <em>Narcissus</em> (1597). Ultimately, Muniz’s subject is illusionism itself, photography’s inheritance from a history of physical and optical craft that stretches back beyond the Romans and the Greeks to the origins of human intelligence. As his art reminds us, all picture-­making is a process of reflecting and recycling that turns mere materials into stuff of the mind.