Books by Jason Fulford

Offline Activities

by Tamara Shopsin, Jason Fulford

Return to the real world! A coupon-style booklet of 52 activities for offline fun, from Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin
Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin's Offline Activities is a book of 52 suggestions for things you can do in real life. Rearrange your furniture; invite an old friend to lunch; bring something home from the supermarket and treat it as sculpture. Part novelty, part self-help guide, Offline Activities encourages you to seek out the chance and mystery that is often lacking in the digital age.

Featuring the kind of ingenious, charming design you expect from a Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin project, Offline Activities is designed as a coupon book with tear-out pages, with one inspirational suggestion and quote per page. You are encouraged to physically do the activity and rip the page out of the book as proof. If you do one offline activity per week, the book will last a year. Offline Activities is a delightfully analog, pleasantly practical guide to shaking up your offscreen life.

Tamara Shopsin (born 1979) is an illustrator, graphic designer, writer and part-time cook in her family’s New York restaurant. She is the author of two memoirs, Mumbai New York Scranton (2013) and Arbitrary Stupid Goal (2017), designer of the 5 Year Diary and coauthor, with Jason Fulford, of the children's book This Equals That (2014), among many other projects.

Jason Fulford (born 1973) is a photographer and cofounder of J&L Books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a frequent lecturer at universities and has led workshops across the globe. His numerous monographs include The Mushroom Collector (2011) and Hotel Oracle (2013).

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

by Jason Fulford

At turns humorous and absurd, heartfelt and searching, Photo No-Nos is for photographers of all levels wishing to avoid easy metaphors and to sharpen their visual communication skills.

Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot―things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary. Photo No-Nos features ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals, along with an encyclopedic list of more than a thousand taboo subjects compiled from and with pictures by contributors.

Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility. At a time when societies are reckoning with what and how to communicate through media and who has the right to do so, this book is a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

The Photographer's Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas

by Jason Fulford, Gregory Halpern

The best way to learn is by doing. The Photographer's Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories and anecdotes from many of the world's most talented photographers and photography professionals. Whether you're looking for exercises to improve your craft—alone or in a group—or you're interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with photographic process. Inside you will find advice for better shooting and editing, creative ways to start new projects, games and activities and insight into the practices of those responsible for our most iconic photographs—John Baldessari, Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jim Goldberg, Miranda July, Susan Meiselas, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Tim Walker and many more. The book also features a Polaroid alphabet by Mike Slack, which divides each chapter, and a handy subject guide. Edited by acclaimed photographers Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, the assignments and project ideas in this book are indispensable for teachers and students, and great fun for everyone fascinated by taking pictures.

Marred for Life! Defaced Record Covers from the Collection of Greg Wooten

by Jason Fulford

Found art in the form of record covers, lovingly and mischievously vandalized by anonymous music lovers

Marred for Life! presents over 250 record covers, lovingly and mischievously vandalized by anonymous music lovers. The LP covers were selected from the collection of Greg Wooten, a Los Angeles-based collector, musician and design purveyor. Wooten and his community of record-collector friends have discovered these in used record bins over the course of several years. Sometimes over-the-top and other times subtle--and often, really funny--the objects become a kind of found folk art.

Bloodshot eyes, blackened teeth, moustaches, tattoos, reviews, love letters, collage and psychedelic and pornographic embellishings of record covers by Elvis, the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Yoko Ono, Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin, Sparks, LL Cool J, David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Mose Allison, Prince, Tim Buckley, Neil Young and more can be found here. The book is edited by Jason Fulford, in a way that highlights connections and humor between the covers.

Corita Kent: Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us

by Jason Fulford, Julie Ault, Jordan Weitzman

Corita Kent's photographs of vernacular inspiration--from street signs and folk art to kites, parades and fairs

Corita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College's art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students.
Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually, Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city's media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents, experiments, projects, Mary's Day celebrations stemming from Corita's classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center's vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita's philosophy of looking.
Corita Kent (1918-86) was known for her iconic art, innovative teaching methods and messages of social justice. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa, she entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood at age 18. As a professor and later chair of the art department, she helped establish its reputation as a hub of creativity and liberal thinking. By 1968, her art was enormously popular, showing in more than 230 exhibitions and held in public and private collections around the world. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986.

Lots of Lots

by Jason Fulford

Jason Fulford?s latest book is a vibrant riff on conceptual artist Sol LeWitt?s 1977 publication PhotoGrids. Lots Of Lots transforms the seemingly quotidian objects captured by Fulford in nearly seven hundred photographs into an evocative collection of interconnected and overlapping forms. Employing a 3x3 format with nine square images on each page, Fulford groups his photographs by idiosyncratic features such as colour palette, slogans, distinctive shadows, and geometric shape. Untethered by location, style, or time, they move between coherence and collision in reflection of the varying order and disorder of the world. An empty laundrette, a lone park bench, and a cascading waterfall are among the many sights that find new resonance in Fulford?s wry and illuminating compositions, revealing beauty among endless production and consumption.