Twelve tales of Italy in an enigmatic conversation between words and images

Jason Fulford is a photographer, editor and teacher born in Atlanta, Georgia, fifty years ago. Today he lives in Brooklyn with his wife Tamara Shopsin, a graphic designer, illustrator and writer (his illustrations appear occasionally on the New Yorker). In recent years Fulford has stood out for his original approach to the creation of his books, which combine humor and erudition. In 2014, the artist created a children’s book with Shopsin entitled “This Equals That”. The little reader is faced with pairs of images of different subjects, which refer to each other. Turning the page, the image that was on the right is reproposed on the left, while on the right there is a third photograph with which a new relationship is created. The process repeats itself in a chain that ends, in a perfect circle, with the initial image. Fulford conceives of his books as complex machines for the production of meaning and puzzles, whose main fuel is photographs.

His latest volume, published this year for Mack, is entitled “The Heart is a Sandwich”. The book is structured as a collection of twelve short stories, made with images taken during his stays in Italy over the last decade. The first story, Borgia’s Braids, is dedicated to the typical bread of Ferrara, which legend says was born to pay homage to the wife of Duke Alfonso d’Este, Lucrezia Borgia. The sequence opens with an image of an orange car parked next to a maritime pine. On the next page we read: “I promised you I would make a short film about death, and I didn’t succeed”. This is followed by images of bars, barriers, road markers, posts painted white and red or crossing each other, recalling the shape of Ferrara bread. It reads: “Idea: The protagonist drives a taxi across a river and then can’t find his way back to the tunnel. So he spends the rest of his ‘life’ over there, where things are similar, but slightly different.” Words and images communicate with each other and we witness this enigmatic discussionbut the idea of ​​another world where everything is as it is in ours, but slightly different, is permeated with a sense of promise.

In one of the following stories, the one that gives the book its title, Fulford takes us to the seashore. The real one and the represented one, where the balance of the images is played out on the horizon line. Leafing through the pages, we see a text forming, as if it were produced by an artificial intelligence program which, in spite of itself, creates a short poem: “The sea was a great void. She stared at him thinking pretentious thoughts. The sea did not judge. He absorbed thoughts of him the way his great-grandfather’s face wrinkled into a California raisin. A sweet, stubborn, shriveled old grape.” It was then the turn of the story about the garage by Guido Guidi, the great photographer who lives immersed in the Romagna countryside: “In an old persimmon farm there lived a wise man…”. There are no images of persimmons, but only details of Guidi’s house, such as a book by Alain Robbe-Grillet or a sorghum broom.

But the most touching sequence is perhaps the one dedicated to the Modena cemetery, entitled “Rosso Rossi”. The American photographer alternates images of Aldo Rossi’s building with a page from his 1981 “Scientific Autobiography”: “Architecture was one of the ways humanity had tried to survive; it was a way of expressing the fundamental pursuit of happiness.” At the center of the sequence we find the image of a portion of the red wall of the cemetery, crossed by darker red cracks. Next to it is that of a very blue sky invaded by a flock of white clouds. Another passage by Rossi follows, which is as if he were describing Fulford’s poetics: “This ability to use pieces of mechanisms whose overall meaning is partly lost has always interested me, even in formal terms. I think of a unit, or a system, made solely of recomposed fragments”. This is precisely the dynamics of the American artist’s work, who travels the world collecting image-fragments and, back home, tries to recompose his hypothesis of a new unity. What it is, then this unit, is difficult to say. Raymond Carver concluded a poem by him thus: “Happiness. Arrives / Unexpected. And it goes beyond, indeed, / any morning chat on the subject”.