JASON FULFORD (Atlanta, Georgia, 1973)
Key West, 2009 (from The Mushroom Collector)
The Mushroom Collector was released 2010 by The Soon Institute and immediately became one of the most appreciated artist books. It all started when a friend gave Fulford a manila envelope, found at a flea market, full of anonymous photographs of mushrooms. The mushroom images stuck in Fulford’s mind, and then gradually started to grow into his own work.
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You know a Jason Fulford photograph when you see it, by that sense of endless play and the aura of enigma that the apparent simplicity of the image implies. Whether as a designer, editor, publisher, teacher or photographer, Fulford produces accurate images, transforming the commonplace into metaphor. Humor and sadness often share the same frame of a single picture, like two sides of a coin.
And the interactions he creates between larger groups of images — in a book, in a photo essay, in a gallery show — have a peculiar musicality that feels both rigorously planned and completely spontaneous.
He has published and edited over 20 books. Even as the vast archive of his work was made around the world for over half a lifetime, his work is less about dates and locations than about the mysteries of perception and the poetic ambiguities of the commonplace.
