Nicholas Muellner: Love in a Time of Allegory

Abstract

This lecture mingles the artist's recent photographs with historical artworks and contemporary media images to argue for an urgent return to allegory in the contemporary moment. In resistance to a morally and aesthetically bankrupt philosophy of realism, Muellner suggests that a new and nimble language of allegory is necessary to rescue photography from its complicity with social and political atomization.

Biography

Nicholas Muellner is an artist and writer whose six single-author books include Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, The Amnesia Pavilions, and In Most Tide an Island, which was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook Award, and selected as an outstanding book of the year in Artforum. In addition to solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, his writings have been published by MACK/SPBH, Aperture, Radius, Triple Canopy, Foam, Routledge, and others. Muellner has performed slide lectures internationally, including at MoMA P.S.1, the Carnegie Museum, The Photographers Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been supported by the 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the John Gutmann Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies, among others. Muellner received a B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University and an M.F.A. from Temple University. He is the founding Co-Director of the Image Text M.F.A. and ITI Press at Cornell University.