The Amnesia Pavilions, Nicholas Muellner’s stunning new book of textual and visual autobiography, takes as its central narrative his return trip to a small city in Eastern Siberia after a seventeen-year absence. Traveling back to Ulan-Ude in the fall of 2009, Muellner set out to find a close friend whose trail had run cold. Guided (and haunted) by the extensive photographic and written material produced on his earlier journeys, as well as reflective chronicling of his futile retracings, this book considers the impossibility of tracking down and understanding one’s former self. Along the way, this autobiographical safari also serves as a framework for viewing the massive cultural and socio-economic change that has transformed provincial Russia. 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.

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Nicholas Muellner is a photographer, writer, and curator based in central New York. His work considers the poetics of representation as a conduit between political understanding and personal experience. His most recent book project focuses on autobiographical narrative and the place of photography within that practice. These include The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009) and The Amnesia Pavilions (A-Jump Books, 2011), which was selected as a top photo book of 2011 by Time Magazine. In addition to solo and group exhibitions in the US and Russia, he has collaborated on critical writings, multi-media works, and curatorial projects. He teaches photography and critical studies at the Park School of Communications, Ithaca College.

A-Jump Books is a small publishing house dedicated to producing photo-based books that challenge convention through understatement and artistic rigor. Using the “artist’s book” concept as a model, we publish projects that are conceived of and designed as self-contained works.