"My first idea for this project was to draw Hollywood stars with diamonds. I wanted to test the degree of interference between the overkill glamour of the stars themselves and that of shiny rocks. I thought it might become intoxicating and conceptually claustrophobic. I drew Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, and others, all in the sultry, soft, angled front-light illumination of movie glamour, and shot the results with unforgiving hard light, to turn the rocks into prisms."
(Vik Muniz quoted in Refex: A Vik Muniz Primer, New York, 2005, p. 97)