This publication in Ivorypress’s LiberArs series is dedicated to Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (São Paulo, 1961), who, with the title The Weimar File draws us into an unpleasant experience with a noir tinge that takes place in post-9/11 United States and from which the photographic project covered in this book came to be.

Using the Kafkaesque situation he is subject to as his starting point, Muniz invites us to reflect on the intentionality and significance of photography.

Thanks to an artistic residency in the city of Weimar, he took thousands of photographs of objects, which he tried to rid of their historic significance in order to endow them with an intriguing quality.

The first version of The Weimar File, which contained around four hundred and fifty images, was exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2007.
Edited by Vik Muniz.

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‘The Weimar File’ is a previously unpublished work by visual artist Vik Muniz, best known for remaking famous artworks in materials other than paint and then photographing them. Having once been personally investigated by the Department of Homeland Security in New York, Muniz used the incident as inspiration for a series of hundreds of photos he made in Weimar, Germany. Perceived through a sheen of fear and suspicion, the images seemingly yearn for a balance between the banal and the spectacular, the deadly serious and the absurd. Fragments of visual evidence, they raise questions of what new meanings such images take on when they are removed from their context.