Whiteness

"Black people, long the victims of discrimination, have written about their vulnerabilities, suffering, and triumphs in the face of oppression and predjudice. The student of race, Hooks concluded, needed to examine the source of power, instead of its victims: What's going on with Whiteness?"

-Maurice Berger, White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art

I have only just recently been introduced to this issue of Whiteness, but will write more as soon as I have a better understanding of it!

Vik Muniz

When Muniz came to the United States from Brazil in 1983, he found "The Best of Life" at a yardsale and immediately became attached to it, saying that it, "somehow made me feel safer. It made me feel more a part of the place where I was living."(Excerpt of Vik Muniz and Charles Ashley Stainback interview - Seeing is Believing.)
When he lost the book 5 years later, he started to think about the importance of the photographs and his capability to remember the images he spent years admiring. In his work appropiately titled, The Best of Life, Muniz attempts to recreate Life's Magazine's most significant images with "memory renderings," or pencil drawings of the way in which he specifically recalls the photograph. When he struggled with a specific placement or detail, he would call friends and ask them to try and recall the photograph as best they could. What he came to realize was that everyone remembered the images differently and stored them in their mind as they saw put. Muniz believes, "The visual world is like a crossword puzzle: we all have the same puzzle but each of us solves it differently."
I can relate to Muniz's "memory renderings" in my attempts to recreate my personal memories, except that my memories have no physical point of reference. I'm intrigued by the way in which his drawings led him to discover and investigate the way in which different minds work. In my continuting attempts to recreate my memories of Brazil, I am unsure of the way in which to begin, because of the knowledge I have about the way I disconnect myself from personal work. I would like discover greater things in my work, other than myself, much like Muniz did, because it would make the work much more significant in itself, and to others as well.