The Amnesia Pavilions is an annotated slideshow based on Nicholas Muellner’s new book of photographs and writing, recently named by Time Magazine a top photo book of 2011 . This autobiographical safari returns to the last days of Soviet Russia in search of both a missing friend and a lost version of the author’s former self. The Amnesia Pavilions argues for the incommensurability of the past and the present, and examines photography’s personal, vernacular and historical role in both bridging and broadening the temporal chasm of understanding.

“Alongside Muellner’s photographs, he tells a story about a recent trip to Russia, retracing his steps from 17 years earlier while trying to find an old friend who has disappeared. Text and image are represented in equal parts, and play off of each other with subtlety and emotion. The older Muellner reflects on the younger version of himself with both nostalgia and a critical eye.” — Jason Fulford, J&L BOOKS

Nicholas Muellner is a photographer, writer, and curator based in central New York. His work across a range of disciplines and practices considers the poetics of representation as a conduit between political understanding and personal experience. His most recent book projects focus on autobiographical narrative and the place of photography with that practice. These include The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009), and The Amnesia Pavilions (A-Jump Books, 2011). In addition to solo and group exhibitions in the US and Russia, he has collaborated on critical writings, multi-media works and curatorial projects, including Now Is The Winter, an exhibition of politically and psychologically linked works by U.S. and Russian artists that closeded at Proekt_Fabrika in Moscow in May 2007. He teaches photography and critical studies at the Park School of Communications, Ithaca College.

Dan Torop is a photographer and digital artist whose work often plunges into the fantastically irrational relationship between the land and its inhabitants. He described Twain’s visit to Lake Tahoe for Triple Canopy magazine, and then recreated the story as a 53 foot wall scroll. He is engaged in fieldwork for a further Twain project at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover residency site. Torop spent years digitally creating a small patch of the ocean and during a residency at Eyebeam programmatically rebuilt three blocks of the Bowery. He has exhibited photographs of formal sorrow and dream spaces at the Derek Eller Gallery. In 2010, A-Jump Books published Skydiving, a sequence of his landscapes and portraits. Torop lives in Brooklyn, and teaches at NYU’s studio art program.

Jim Supanick is a videomaker and writer born in Cleveland, Ohio, and living in Brooklyn. Forthcoming videos include a long-term project titled “Seed Sold Back to the Farmer”, a two-part animated essay about the assembly line and its legacy of damage, as well as a re-edited segment of Caspar Stracke’s “Circle’s Short Circuit” (featuring an interview with Avital Ronell). He has received support from NYSCA, the Puffin Foundation, and the Experimental Television Center. His essays on film, video, and visual culture have appeared in such publications as Film Comment, Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Cineaste, and The Brooklyn Rail, along with exhibition catalogs and with DVD releases; others can be accessed at As a Chimney Draws. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a NYFA Grant for Nonfiction Literature. He is also a member of Synthhumpers, a quasi-musical collaboration with Josh Solondz. Jim currently teaches at City College of New York.