The Gypsy Magna–Pictures of Garbage Photograph by Vik Muniz, courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

You each share a fascination with garbage and discarded materials. How did that fascination begin?
Lucy Walker (LW): About ten years ago, I met Robin Nagel, an amazing woman who was teaching an NYU graduate seminar in garbage. The issues she was covering interested me… What are the politics and socioeconomics of garbage? What does it say about a culture — what they throw away, where they throw it? She took the class on a trip to Fresh Kills, a landfill on Staten Island, and I went along. It was only when I got there that I suddenly thought, wow, I have never sufficiently grasped that garbage doesn’t vanish, that it’s physically present in the world — that everything you throw away goes someplace. And in this case, if you were living in New York City in 2000, it was going to Fresh Kills. It was such a horrifying revelation that every single thing I’d ever thrown away was under there. As a filmmaker I thought, why has no one filmed that? It was such a powerful place; I made a mental note that it would make a great place to make a documentary.
Vik Muniz (VM): Garbage is something that we’re always trying to hide. We put it in black bags so we don’t have to see what’s inside. It’s the parts of your history that you don’t want in your family albums. In other words, it’s a very non-visual material, and for a visual artist to be working with it seemed like a good idea. A lot of what happens in my work happens because of this tension between the image and the material. To work with garbage or discarded things is a little repulsive, so once the viewer gets closer to the material, there’s something that’s actually pushing away from it. The dynamics are very peculiar.