Vik Muniz

The Best of Life. Here,from an interview with Peter Galassi, is Muniz's own description of his project:

"The Best of Life Series, for example, are drawings of very famous photographs made entirely from memory. When the drawings were good enough to look like a bad reproduction of the original image, I photographed them and printed them with the same half tone pattern we usually see in these images for the first time in the papers. In these works I tried to find out what a photograph looks like in your head when you are not looking at it. They carried the structure of the famous news pictures but they were in fact very different."

  

Photograph of a kiss in Times Square on V-J day (August 14, 1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and memory rendering of it by Vik Muniz. Interestingly, there seem to be a lot of claimants to be the sailor portrayed in this photograph.

Photograph of astronaut Buzz Aldrin by Neil Armstrong, 1969, and memory rendering of it by Vik Muniz.

Photograph, "The Unknown Rebel", taken by AP photographer Jeff Widenerin Tiananmen Square in 1989, and memory rendering of it by Vik Muniz.

One interesting thing going on in these pairings are the left/right reversals. Note that each of those three images are reversed horizontally: the tanks slope high left to low right in Muniz's memory, but the other way (and not as much) in Widener's photograph; Muniz remembers Aldrin's right arm, not his left arm, being bent up; and the kissers bend to the left not to the right. I wonder what's going on here (is there a cognitive scientist in the house?)

It would be quite interesting to have someone draw, ever from memory or from someones description, a photography it could be another idea for this g, filming some one drawing a family photo from memory or from a description of a photo from memory.