Who Is Benjamin Viulet?

An Argentine artist who turned childhood illness into a philosophy, refuses CGI on principle, and has reached hundreds of millions of people with art designed to make them cry, then remember who they are.

Benjamin Viulet is an Argentine ritual artist and in-camera photographer, and the founder of the art atelier Mirrors by Viulet. Known also as Bv, Viulet, and earlier as lasfotosdebenja, he has built an audience of millions and produced videos viewed hundreds of millions of times. His work, emotionally direct images he calls “Mirrors,” is built entirely in-camera, often at great expense and physical risk, and is designed not to decorate but to confront the viewer with themselves.

What is Benjamin Viulet known for?

Viulet is known for three things. First, an uncompromising commitment to in-camera photography: he builds his images for real, on set, on fire, underwater, in the dirt, refusing CGI even when a single photograph costs thousands of dollars and carries real danger. Second, a body of work that audiences describe as life-changing, art that makes people cry and reconsider how they live. Third, a spiritual philosophy that frames art as a sacred act of remembering, summarized in his recurring line, “essence leads to essence leads to heaven on earth.”

“i did not come here to decorate the world. i came to open it. to hold up a mirror and invite you to look.”

Where is Benjamin Viulet from?

Viulet was born in Belgrano, Buenos Aires, in a dramatic emergency birth during a record snowstorm. At the age of five he was diagnosed with a rare form of juvenile arthritis, an autoimmune illness that would swell his joints until he could not walk. Unable to play the sports that dominated his town, he turned inward, an experience he now credits as the origin of his art. We tell that story in full in the illness that made the artist.

How did Benjamin Viulet become an artist?

His path was not academic. Confined by illness, the young Viulet spent hours inside computer games and fantasy worlds, learning, as he puts it, “how to type a question into a blank screen and hope the truth would answer.” At sixteen, in pain and lost, he searched “how do i stop being insecure,” a question that led him to the philosopher Alan Watts and began what he calls his first true remembering. He built an early audience under the name lasfotosdebenja before becoming Benjamin Viulet.

What does Benjamin Viulet believe about art?

Viulet’s philosophy is laid out in what he calls the four sacraments: Belief (art is a sacred mirror of the soul), Essence (creating as a way to return to who we are), Process (everything built by hand, in his own flesh, at real risk), and Welcome (art meant to wake you up rather than impress you). These beliefs shape both his images and the atelier, Mirrors by Viulet, through which he releases them.