[3][4] His works often combine images with text; treat themes related to repressed intimacy and human connection; and contain elements of autobiography, abstraction, photojournalism, and fiction.
[2][5][7] [I]n that odd summer, in which history lurched forward and back, like a train stopping abruptly in the wilderness at night ... change was measurable in people's willingness to describe their business plans and dreams of travel, their extortion rackets and erotic fantasies, to a young American with a camera.
[2][9] Muellner speaks Russian, and during his undergraduate studies in 1990, he received a student travel grant to visit the Soviet Union and photograph his rail journey from Moscow to Khabarovsk.
The project was an interactive version of Pong adapted to include quotations from Mao Zedong, tips for effective salesmanship, and commentary by Muellner and Harrod on intimacy and personal relationships.
[8] In 2013, he created a photographic body of work called The Nautiloid Heart, which was exhibited at Noshowspace in London and at the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
[5][12][13] While in the Caribbean photographing for The Nautiloid Heart, Muellner began to correspond with closeted gay men in Russia and Ukraine, including several in Crimea, shortly before the Russian annexation of that region.
[5][6][14] Muellner connects the two worlds with the theme of solitude, and the work also includes commentary on the internet as a means of indulgence and temporary escape from loneliness.
[6] One of his earliest influences to this end was Duane Michals, whose books he said "seduced [him] not only with their mystical-whimsical narratives of word-image interplay, but with their spiritually gauzed-over homoeroticism.