History in the Waste Land

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches growOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA heap of broken images. . . .

What I really want to do is to be able to change the lives of a group of people with the same material that they deal with every day.

~ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

~ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

~ Vik Muniz, Waste Land (2008)

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Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David, 1793 Marat (Sebastião), Vik Muniz, 2008

Woman Ironing, Pablo Picasso, 1904

Woman Ironing (Isis), Vik Muniz, 2008

The Sower, Jean-François Millet, 1850 The Sower (Zumbo), Vik Muniz, 2008

The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet, 1857

The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, 1922 (with Allen Ginsberg’s annotations)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches growOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA heap of broken images. . . .

What I really want to do is to be able to change the lives of a group of people with the same material that they deal with every day.

~ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

~ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

~ Vik Muniz, Waste Land (2008)