Today we’d like to introduce you to Benjamin Viulet.
Hi Benjamin, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
my story is probably a lot like yours. made of wounds, laughter, raging hope, and quiet miracles.
i was born in buenos aires at three in the morning, an emergency birth, while the biggest snowstorm in the history of san martín de los andes kept my father trapped a thousand miles away. my mother was alone. she almost died bringing me here. that is how i arrived. through pain, through isolation, and through a woman who gave everything so i could live. i think everything i make still carries that shape.
at five years old i was diagnosed with a rare juvenile arthritis. my knees, my feet, my hands would swell until i could not walk. my first true memory is my mother carrying me onto a plane, crying, trying to save me. doctors, needles, blood tests, and her hand around mine through every one of them. she searched everywhere for healing, from hospitals to reiki to priests. and i will say something now that i could never have said before: that illness was the best thing that ever happened to me. it took my body, and it forced me inside. and inside is where i found the first sparks of my soul.
i grew up in patagonia, in a town where sports were everything, and i could not play. so i turned inward. i also grew cruel for a while, because fear does that to a child, and i hurt people, and those are the only moments of my life i regret. they taught me the truth i now build everything on: the ones who hurt are the ones who are hurting the most. healing is kindness when it is hardest.
at sixteen, lost and insecure, i typed a question into a blank screen. how do i stop being insecure. that search led me to alan watts, and the first true remembering of my life began. not of a fact. of myself.
years later that remembering became my work. people first met me as lasfotosdebenja, then as benjamin viulet, when my photographs began reaching millions. but i realized i was not taking photographs at all. i was building mirrors. artworks designed so that the part of you that has gone unseen for years finally meets your eye. that became mirrors by viulet, my fine art atelier at the edge of patagonia. everything is made by hand, real sets, real fire, real water, months of work for a single image, because in an age of machines i believe the world needs proof that a human being still bled for the work.
today the mirrors live as limited edition fine art in collections across more than forty countries. the avalon letters carry a sealed envelope of art, ritual, and story to members all over the world every month, my way of sitting down and thinking of one person at a time. and the monoliths, single originals that exist once and never again, i deliver by hand, in person, wherever their keeper lives.
but underneath all of it, the story is the same one that started in that snowstorm. a boy who was forced inside, and found something there worth showing people. i do not make art to decorate walls. i make it to remind you of who you were before the world told you who to be.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
the obstacles have been the smooth road.
water would not make that beautiful sound without some stones in between. take the stones away and the river goes silent. it is the resistance that makes the music. and a life works the same way. every obstacle, every piece of darkness, is the very thing that carries you toward your light.
when i look back now, i see a graveyard of everything that did not happen, and i understand it was a garden all along. every artwork that was never born, the hundreds of images i dreamed and could not yet build, because the skill was not there, because the money was not there, because the courage was not there. every gallery i wanted to enter as a young man that said no. every door that closed quietly, without even the dignity of a rejection letter. every collector who almost bought and vanished. every piece i destroyed at three in the morning because it was not true enough.
i wanted those doors so badly. i thought each no was taking something from me. it took me years to see that every no was aiming me. the galleries that rejected me forced me to build a direct bridge to the people my work was actually for, no walls, no middlemen, one soul to another. that refusal became the foundation of everything i have today. the failed artworks taught my hands what the successful ones would later need. the empty months taught me that i was not doing this for the harvest, i was doing it because i could not not do it. and that answer, once you have bled for it, can never be taken from you.
so when people ask about struggles, i have to be careful, because the honest answer sounds like madness: i am grateful for nearly every one. not in the moment. in the moment i cursed like anyone. but time keeps revealing the same secret, that what i called failure was navigation. every closed door was the path itself, redirecting me toward a road that did not exist yet, the one i was supposed to build.
because here is what the stones taught me: something is only an obstacle if it is resisted. the moment you stop fighting the stone and start flowing around it, it becomes the classroom. it gives you the learnings, the composure, the depth you could not have carried otherwise. the river does not curse the rock. the river sings because of it.
so no, the road was not smooth. it was perfect. those are not the same thing, and thank god for that.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
i create mirrors.
what does that even mean? it means i believe true art has only ever had one purpose: to bring you closer to your own self. so i am not in the art business. i am in the soul business.
technically, what i do is photography. fine art photographs that take months to build. but nothing about how i make them is technical. i build the real sets. i light the real fire. i stand in the real water, the real cold, the real doubt. no shortcuts. and let me be honest about what that choice costs, because it would be so much easier not to make it. i could photoshop these scenes in a week. a machine could conjure them in seconds. instead i choose the path that costs a hundred times more money, a thousand times more time, ten thousand times more effort. a bathtub burning in a frozen forest. a woman standing inside a breaking wave. a man between a massive heart and a brain 10 meters underwater. months of construction for one single image.
why? because the experience is all that there is. ai does not ache. it does not hesitate. it does not shake while holding the camera or cry mid-shoot or wonder if it is enough. i do. and that trembling is what enters the work. when you stand before one of my mirrors, i want you to feel the sweat behind the beauty, the uncertainty behind the clarity, the human heart behind the frame. the machine will always win at results. but i am not in the results business either. i am in the presence business. i do not want to outrun the machine. i want to out-feel it.
what am i known for? artworks that look back at you. pieces built with symbols your soul recognizes before your mind does, so that when the right one finds you, you have no choice but to face yourself. and what am i most proud of? exactly those moments. when someone writes to me and says a piece reflected them so deeply that something in them broke open, and they began, quietly, to choose love over fear. that is the whole harvest. everything else is decoration.
and what sets me apart from others? i am me. i die on that hill. every single one of us is essence itself, completely unique, unrepeatable, incomparable. no one in the history of the universe will ever be able to do what i do, because what i do is who i am. and the same is true of you, reading this right now. that is not a marketing line. that is the entire message of the work.
art was never meant to match the furniture. it is not a luxury. it is a necessity. a sacred mirror where you remember who you were before the world told you who to be. i do not want to decorate your home. i want to ignite your becoming.
i am and so the world transforms.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
my unshakable knowing that everything, everywhere, all the time, is always acting in my favor.
i know how that sounds. the mind wants to argue with it immediately, wants to bring evidence, wants to point at the failures and the closed doors and the nights of doubt. but this is the quality that built everything i have: i am favored by every single thing that enters my life. nothing ever goes poorly or wrongly for me. nothing ever has. no matter where i am, no matter when i am, no matter what i am doing, i am blessed in ways that defy all logical understanding. the storm that trapped my father the night i was born, the illness that took my legs as a child, the galleries that said no, the artworks that failed, every one of them was the universe aiming me somewhere better than where i was pointing myself. i did not always see it in the moment. seeing it is not required. knowing it is.
and understand, this is not positive thinking. positive thinking is the mind trying to convince itself. this is deeper than the mind. it is a knowing that lives in the chest, the same place a bird keeps its migration. when you carry it, fear loses its throne. you stop protecting yourself from life and start receiving it. you take the risks that essence asks of you, the fire, the ocean, the months of work on a single image, the leap with no gallery and no map, because you know, the way water knows how to flow downhill, that you cannot actually fall. you can only be redirected.
and from that knowing comes the second half of the secret, which is really the same secret: acting without acting. being, the way a wave waves. the way a bird birds. the way light lights. when i create, there is no benjamin trying to make something happen. there is no separation between the maker and the made. i do not make the art, i am the art, and when i stop resisting, it simply comes through, the way the ocean does not force itself to wave. no pushing. no efforting. no performing. just essence, moving.
and here is what i have learned, again and again, until it became unshakable: every single thing created from that place carries the signature of that place. when i act from true essence, without mind, without fear, everything i make brings love, light, understanding, and remembrance into the world. it cannot help it. a thing made from truth transmits truth. a thing made from fear transmits fear, no matter how beautiful its surface. the work inherits the state of the soul that made it.
so if you ask me the one quality, it is this marriage: total trust in life, and total surrender to essence. trust that the road is always favoring you, and surrender to what wants to move through you. hold those two, and you become unstoppable in the only way that matters. not unstoppable at winning. unstoppable at being.
for essence leads to essence leads to heaven on earth.
Pricing:
- i wrestled with pricing for years, because i believe art is a necessity, not a luxury. so i built three doors into this world, and one of them was built for everyone.
- the avalon letters, $33 a month. this is the door i am most proud of, and the one i made so that no soul would ever be priced out of true art. avalon is a sealed envelope that arrives at your home every month, from my hands to yours: a signed artwork, a manuscript revealing its meaning, a letter i write to you, a ritual to practice, a chapter of an ongoing story, and always one thing i never announce. it is not a subscription to art. it is a correspondence with your soul. members in more than thirty countries open it alone, slowly, the way you open something sacred. i do not just mail you art. i mail you back to yourself.
- the mirrors, $500 to $1,000. museum quality limited edition fine art photographs, signed and numbered. each edition is small, and when it sells out, it is gone forever, several already are. these are the works that take months to build in the flesh, real sets, real fire, real water, and they are made to hang in your home and look back at you for the rest of your life.
- the monoliths, from $50,000. single originals. one in the world, never repeated, never reproduced. each monolith is acquired by private viewing only, and i deliver it myself, by hand, in person, wherever on earth its keeper lives. it is the most intimate thing i offer, a piece that exists once, passing directly from my hands into one life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mirrorsbyviulet.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benjaminviulet/
