There are times when a image locks in with where I find myself in life, in my existential meandering, in my visual hunger. It haunts me deeply. I carry it like an obligation to my being. It feels akin to the sensation of pulling tarot cards or finishing a Richard Linklater movie, i.e. Slacker, Boyhood, the Before series. It leaves me with questions that allow me to confront thoughts already swimming in my mind, thoughts I am often too distracted to face, partly because of contemporary living. We live in a time of image saturation, of hyper-production, where images circulate faster than meaning. As Vilém Flusser predicted, we have shifted from a text-based culture to an image-based one, where images are often consumed without deep decoding. I want to slow things down for myself. I want to sit with the images that grab hold of my attention.
Each week I’ll focus some time living with and writing about a single image from an art or photo book in my library. It will not always be a defining work from that artist. It will be something that is a visual vehicle, something that collides with the pileup of living. It may seem odd to pull a single image out of a monograph or catalog meant to be read as a whole, but isolating it from the sequence opens the possibility of a different encounter. One less guided by narrative. One more attuned to the image itself. My intention is not to interpret the work fully or academically. It is to feel out what the image says about my position in life within this moment in time.
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For the last week, Jason Fulford’s The Mushroom Collector has lived open in my studio to a photograph marked “33.” in the lower left corner. In the notes section there is no clarification, no caption attached to the thirty-third image of the book. The mystery adds to my attraction to “33.”
The photograph is a square. A white board fills most of the frame. On it, a hand-drawn table stretches across the surface, divided into columns numbered one through twelve. Each column holds crude tally marks in black, blue, and red. Daylight casts a cool blue tone into the shadows. Below the board, the color gathers around a set of primitive looking dice, their dots slightly misaligned. A cup and its lid sit nearby, as if used to shake the numbers into being.
It is not the composition or the color that keeps this image in my mind. It is the accumulation of the unknown. The photograph offers no complimentary information. No title. No explanation of the game being played. In column one there is even a question mark.
There are enough traces of human presence for me to imagine several hands at work. The irregular crossing of a tally. The pooling of ink where tool and human seem to have tested one another. The chipped paint on the cup, small windows into each action that produced a mark. The ambiguity keeps me from chasing factual answers. At some point I just become another person at the board, trying to decide where to scratch the next tally.
When I try to recall “33.” in my mind, it is the score keeping and the square format that surfaces as my vision pulls slightly out of focus. I think of countless hands scraping marks on the board to proclaim their existence, to leave something behind as a form of communication, to signify rank. I think of the 6x6 format and how it was once associated to the ephemerality of the photographic medium, and how social media later co-opted it to mimic the nostalgic paper object, masking the impermanence of an information hungry world. All of it begins to feel like a game, and even the marks on the dice don’t feel entirely official.
I’m confronted with life. With American society. I wonder if there are any games where there are no losers. I struggle to think of one. I’m reminded of my participation. I am at the board. I don’t know who designed the game or set the rules, but my presence is participation. This feels true to life as an American. Visibility is currency. Why not rake another tally onto the board? To refuse the mark is to risk disappearing. To deny yourself a voice is to deny yourself an identity.
At some point I realize how deeply I’ve accepted the board as reality. Being human cannot simply be the constant accounting of metrics. Performance has been confused for existence. I keep playing because the alternative feels like erasure. The fear of insignificance runs through all of us, and we enforce it every time we mark the board. There is life beyond the tally. The challenge is peeling away from the board. From comparison. From score keeping.
“33.” is not an overly complicated photograph. It is quiet. Unassuming. It does not radically alter the photographic medium. It returns to a nostalgic format. Each time I encounter it, in person or memory, its hauntological character becomes clearer. It feels like a present shadowed by lost futures. If I stare hard enough, I can hear the soundtrack of unfulfilled potential weighing on the present.
“33.” is from The Mushroom Collector by Jason Fulford. Published by The Soon Institute in 2010.
Link to Jason Fulford’s website:
https://jasonfulford.com/
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.
don't think we will ever get enough of Jason Fulford