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“What is at stake in the making, using and viewing of photographs?” wonders Nicholas Muellner. On the opposite page, a confusing photograph of a disparate jumble could be a snapshot of the writer/photographer’s mind, working to form a coherent answer. Will it succeed?
We get a quick answer as we turn the page: “READER BEWARE. This essay has failed.”
It’s a startling start to the surprisingly diverse Lacuna Park. In twelve parts, it is less a single coherent thesis, more a collection of photography-related writing on different topics in a variety of styles from across the past decade. Incorporating personal history, photography theory, fiction, interviews with psychoanalysts, and (of course) a liberal helping of photographs, it is not short on ambition.
Neither is it short on honesty. Failures – particularly Muellner’s own – recur throughout, usually conveyed via both words and pictures. These failures are invariably instructive and sometimes amusing, such as his repeatedly botched attempts to photograph a ponderous, lumbering model of car – the Volga – which always proves too quick for him.
As with the Volgas, the photographs in the book are sometimes directly relevant to the text, such as where Muellner points his camera the wrong way in the fog (another failure). Sometimes image and text have a more oblique or even impossible-to-fathom relationship, for example with Muellner’s strange fictional narrative which accompanies photographs by Ron Jude – no bad thing if it pushes the reader towards a deeper analysis.
More problematically, however, the text itself very occasionally becomes opaque. “We no longer have use for the suspension of the free self in the ether of the remotely ideological” may mean something, but there must be a clearer way of putting it. But thankfully these lapses are outweighed by numerous instances of pithy clarity, such as “photographs have a way of humiliating the original.” In fact, Muellner has many insightful things to say, for example on how photographs simultaneously reveal and conceal. And the way he says some of these things is thoroughly engaging, such as where a family photograph helps describe his grandmother’s habit of physically cutting faces (especially her own) out of prints (which, coincidentally or intentionally, nicely reinforces the point about humiliation).
Mass culture and capitalist consumption are recurring preoccupations, and continually affect the way Muellner reads photographs. And his essay on Pictorialism and Modernism/ Ruskin and Stieglitz forms its conclusion via a very contemporary sexual- and gender-political prism. But perhaps this is an underlying theme running silently through the book: our view of any photograph in particular, or the wider world in general, is always moulded by our individual experiences and values. Without doubt, my reading of Lacuna Park was shaped in exactly the same way, as is your reading of this review of it. This all ties back to a Luigi Ghirri quotation Muellner uses early on: “Photography is a language in which the difference between reproduction and interpretation, however subtle, exists and gives rise to an infinite number of imaginary worlds.”
So does Muellner succeed in answering his initial all-encompassing question? Of course not. Attempting a comprehensive understanding of photography is as futile as a complete explanation of, say, music, or literature. It is far too complex a mess to unravel so entirely. That Muellner has an often-incisive stab at it, and can be entertaining along the way, is as much as we could possibly hope for. A dearth of overarching, easy answers may seem disappointing at first, but on reflection, the writer/ photographer’s honest endeavours offer something infinitely more valuable: a springboard for further thought by the reader/ viewer.
– Reviewed by Simon Bowcock
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Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, by Nicholas Muellner, was published by SPBH Editions
