Talk

MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media presents a conversation between artists Vik Muniz and Lucas Blalock, as they discuss Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter, the latest book in The Photography Workshop Series (Aperture, 2025).

In this volume, Vik Muniz—known for his playful pictures that complicate what is understood as a photograph, sculpture, or painting—offers his insight into thinking creatively and seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways. Through images and words, Muniz shares his creative practice and discusses a wide range of topics, from generating ideas and creating artworks that challenge viewers’ perceptions, to thinking through collaboration, imperfection, and the interplay of subject, scale, and material.

Vik Muniz (born in São Paulo, 1961) is a prolific, internationally recognized artist, whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images of our time. His work is featured in major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has published many books, including the Aperture titles Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (2005) and Postcards from Nowhere (2020). Waste Land, a documentary about his work in the favelas and landfills around Rio de Janeiro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010.

Lucas Blalock (born in Asheville, North Carolina, 1978) is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time.