Documentary sees artist at work with trash pickers

It’s not a very good title, “Waste Land” – this isn’t a bleak film, at all – but just about everything else in Lucy Walker’s documentary works, and illuminates.

Traveling with the Brooklyn-based, Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz – an energetic figure whose large-scale photography and portraiture incorporates nontraditional materials (food, wire, metal) – Walker sets down with her small crew in Rio de Janeiro and watches as a truly transformative project takes shape.

Muniz has come to Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest landfills in the world, to shoot portraits of the catadores, pickers who sift through the towering hills of detritus, looking for recyclables to redeem for cash.

Like those portrayed in Millet’s famous painting, “The Gleaners,” these women and men – and children – stoop over the land(fill), gathering, collecting, reaping a harvest. That it is not a field of wheat and grain, but a mountainscape of toxic trash, speaks to the changes that have taken place in the last two centuries.

On one level, the Oscar-nominated “Waste Land” is a film about our planet and how humankind continues to abuse it. But in more insightful, inspiring ways, it is about what happens when an artist invites his subjects into a truly collaborative relationship.

Taking portraits of six of these catadores and blowing them up on a massive scale in a hangar-size studio, Muniz reworks the projected images, augmenting them with garbage and debris culled from the dump.

Then he takes large-format photographs of these giant portrait/assemblage pieces and sells them in a London gallery, with the proceeds going back to the catadores.

Muniz finds the beauty in the garbage. But more importantly, he finds the beauty in the people who live and work in it and around it.

The images are surreal, and strange, but the people doing the scavenging, the culling, become wonderfully real and hardly strange at all.