CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/22/2019

Essay as wreckage and beacon in Nicholas Muellner's 'Lacuna Park'

"READER BEWARE," photographer and Image Text Ithaca co-director Nicholas Muellner writes in the essay, "Making Doubles," the opener to Lacuna Park, his brilliant new collection from SPBH Editions. "This essay has failed. I have been trying to build it for over a decade, but each new edifice of argument inevitably collapses in a contradictory heap of rubble. I have finally come to accept this essay as wreckage: the articulated ruins of an unfinished architecture. It's what I deserve for asking myself a trick question, for trying to build at a time when all the fault lines seem active. I wanted you to see what I have been feeling, but the ground kept shifting beneath my heart." If there's a more endearing introductory paragraph to a photography writings collection, we don't know it. Have your copy signed today at the NY Art Book Fair, where Muellner will present a scripted slide reading at the Artbook Bookstore Event Space from 3–4 PM.