by Jason Fulford
ISBN: 0970165676
Fulford, co-founder of J&L Books (publishers of Mike Slack’s OK OK OK) has created images you’ve probably seen, you just don’t know it: many of his photographs have appeared on book covers. He’s appeared in several exhibitions in the last seven years. He’s one talented guy, and I’d never heard of him until I stumbled across this book at Brookline Booksmith a couple of months ago.
It’s no secret that I love books as objects, and this one really hit a sweet spot in my brain. Not too thick, not too thin, the oversized trade book size with a hardcover binding reminding me of rebound books from school libraries right down to the font — I really needed to pick it up and hold it.
Once I did that, the photographs had me hooked. All are color and square format (which I have soft spot for) and some are paired with empty white pages, others appear facing each other. Light streaks through a forest, imbuing it with an otherworldly quality. Blurry children are captured inside a bouncy house. There are tigers on fuzzy flannel sheets, ivy starting its way up laticework, fake dinosaurs, smushed cars, and sheep running away from the camera. The photographs are quirky, so ordinary they’ve become super-ordinary moments in time.
Fulford has included a location list in the back of the book. Readers learn the images were taken across Canada, in many different parts of the U.S., in Budapest, Beijing, Paris — though none of these appear obvious, and you would be unable to tell unless you were intimately familiar with the exact places he went. They aren’t travel photographs in the sense they show off what is remarkable about a place, because they focus on what is daily, what unexpectedly catches the eye. There is sly humor as well pangs of sadness and surprise. What would you make of a young man kissing the barber’s electric razor in the middle of getting his head shaved?
If you are into vernacular photography, you might want to branch out and try Fulford’s work. If you like photographs that you can imagine a story to, that aren’t about exotic beauty but unexpected glimpses of life, buy this book. Highly recommended.
