artists

Photography was Jack Fulton’s method of answering the questions that had been brewing inside of him since he was a child. Art is “to mate experience with consciousness.” In other words, one’s perception of the world is influenced by the things one experiences, reads, and observes, and art, specifically photography is the product. Through photography, Fulton could find a “soupcon of truth”; analogizing his process to alchemy, Fulton learned “to fuse difference into meaning,” realizing that his work and his life were an “amalgam.” Fulton describes his use of mathematics, free solo in jazz, and stream of consciousness in writing as “tools” to “create a fictional portrayal of a personal reality.”

Jack Fulton is recognized as an influential West Coast photographer. He has been teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1969. Fulton is a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant. He has been exhibited world-wide with notable artists such as Joan Brown, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Nauman, John Divola, and Robert Heinecken. He is published in numerous fine art photography surveys including SF MOMA’s Photography in California, 1945-1980, and the Oakland Museum’s Picturing California: A Century of Photographic Genius. His photographs can be found in the collections of numerous institutions including SF MOMA, Biblioteque National, Paris, Musee de Art Modern, Paris, Oakland Museum, LA County Museum, Chicago Art Institute, San Jose Museum of Art, University of Arizona, the DiRosa Foundation, UNOCAL and Seagrams.

Jack Fulton’s Cibachrome dye-bleached photograph series entitled “A Vainglorious Decade” illustrate his belief that one’s experiences and observations affect one’s perception of the world. Fulton explains that the photographs that he took in his travels through the American West “echo” the “spirit” of the 1970s as “visual similes.” Momentous sociopolitical events of the 60s and 70s- such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, and Malcolm X, the failures of the Vietnam War, the Kent State killings, the first test tube baby, the release of the Apple computer, and the election of the first black congress person, to name just a few- accounted for Fulton’s “mentally constructed photographic eye.” In these photographs Fulton addressed his broad interests, which were “somewhat political” including racialism, feminism, Buddhism, and the rise of environmentalism. His photography was also influenced by the experiences he had during his journey through the West, and the embrace of color and other technological improvements in photography in the 70’s.