Valicia Bathes in Sunday Clothes, from the series Sugar Children

Born in São Paulo, Vik Muniz pursues an artistic vision based on the transformation of the mundane. He painstak-ingly arranges such diverse materials as trash, chocolate syrup, diamonds, and thread to create highly illusionistic images. The resulting compositions are then photographed from above to achieve a trompe l’oeil effect.

Valicia Bathes in Sunday Clothes stems from one of the artist’s earliest experiments with photographing transformed materials. For the Sugar Children series, Muniz worked from Polaroids to recreate the likeness of his subjects in sugar on a black background. The titles of the photographs reveal Muniz’s intimate relationship with the subjects, as they relate the name of each child as well as a personal detail about his or her life, such as Big James Sweats Buckets or Little Calist Can’t Swim. The children come from families who work in sugar cane plantations on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. Muniz chose to fabricate his Sugar Children from the very commodity they labor to produce:

I realized they take the sweetness out of the children by making them work in the fields. It’s very hard work. All the sweetness from them ends up in our coffee. So I made drawings of them from sugar.