Jay Muhlin is an artist working in photography with a focus on books. He is the 2014 Esther & Harvey Graitzer Memorial Prize winner, and attended Review Santa Fe 2012 for his book Guilty Pleasures. Residencies include Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, The Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY, and the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy, NY.
After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography hiswork appeared in various editorial publications worldwide. In 2008 Muhlin published his first long-term book project entitled Half Life: A Portrait of Lauren. The book documents the life and suicide of a close friend and the artist’s relationship to her. Muhlin has taught courses at Syracuse University, Salem Community College, University of Delaware, Moore College of Art and Design, The College of New Jersey, and was a visiting faculty member at Bennington College in 2011. He currently works as a photographer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, teaches at Rowan and La Salle Universities and is an Artist Member of the Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia. Today we share his series Guilty Pleasures.
Guilty Pleasures deposits the viewer into an endless Syracuse, NY winter, with images that build a bizarre, collective psyche shared by a community of people who know they are about to hit an existential impasse. Readers will discover a group of friends who find comfort in their camaraderie, question where they will end up, and desperately try to keep control of their lives.