This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Vik Muniz: Model Pictures presented at The Menil Collection, Houston, February 22-June 9, 2002.

While visiting The Menil Collection, Vik Muniz, creator of what he calls “photographic delusions,” happened upon the museum’s exhibition planning room, which contains a small-scale model of galleries filled with tiny copies of artworks from the permanent collection–museum curators use these models in planning installations. Fascinated, Muniz took digital pictures of the maquettes and, for the exhibition Model Pictures, held at The Menil Collection in spring 2002, enlarged them to the scale of the original works of art that they represent. For the book Model Pictures, a conceptual extension of the exhibition, he shrinks his photographs of the maquettes to their miniature size, or 1:12 of the original artworks.