Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography

Lacuna Park collects writer-photographer Nicholas Muellner’s textual and visual essays created between 2009 and 2019. Intertwining memoir, reportage, fiction and theory, he asks: what is existentially at stake today in the making and viewing of photographs? In a time when nearly everyone has become a photographer, Muellner explores how images have become a means through which we control and care and lose and desire, and most of all, adapt and compensate, forget, remember, and keep going.

Nicholas Muellner is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer and founding co-director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Ithaca College, NY. His previous books include In Most Tides an Island and The Amnesia Pavilions. Muellner’s work has been widely published and exhibited, and recognized by Guggenheim, MacDowell and Yaddo Colony Fellowships.

Sigmund Freud famously declared that “every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance.” For Nicholas Muellner, the same could be said of every photograph. From his unique perspective as a writer-photographer, Muellner functions as both analyst and patient in this deep dive into the significance of pictures. – Alec Soth

Lacuna Park is a quite brilliant book. I devoured Nicholas Muellner’s exquisite writing and perfectly constructed stream of bright consciousness in one sitting. It is a very generous book (it is an adventure) and I suspect that every reader will appreciate the open, personal, poetic and erudite call that Muellner gives to think through the meaning of photography at this juncture in history. – Charlotte Cotton