Nick Muellner

Talks and exhibitions

Muellner has had solo exhibitions in the US, the UK, and Russia. He has given readings at MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Influences Muellner cites James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as the work of Ralph Gibson and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, as inspiration for his use of image–text relationships to tell stories.

Muellner's photographic style is influenced by 1950s New York street photography, 19th-century landscape paintings, and 1990s German conceptual photography. When he was 19, he discovered Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Of this body of photographs, he said, "Looking compulsively at [it] ... electrified me. I was so gripped by that expression of erotic, frank, immediate visual intimacy. But I also learned, eventually, that I was nothing like that. My version of the personal, of processing intimacy, includes the awareness of doubts, paradoxes, and distancing effects."

Selected works