[SOL MOON IZAR]
One of humanity’s first games was riddles. In Greek mythology, the sphinx was a creature made up of three bodies –the face of a woman, the legs of a lion and the torso of a bird– and was revered for the difficulty of its riddles, which decided the fate of those who faced it. Of sacred origin, oracles and other forms of divination survive today under different guises, from tarot cards to riddles that contain hidden meanings in the form of creative statements or symbolic images.
Sol Moon Izar is a board game invented by the American artist Jason Fulford for this Getxophoto edition in which the player is invited to ask a question about their life or future. The question is answered through a composition of three images selected at random by each participant, each of which represents the sun, the moon and the stars. Like any enigma, each triptych contains many possible meanings but each player will see a personal message in it, depending on their imagination, their desires and their fears.
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Jason was born in Atlanta in 1973 and is based in New York. He is an artist and co-founder of J&L Books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow since 2014, a frequent lecturer at universities, and has led workshops across the globe. Fulford’s photographs have been published at many magazines, such as Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, Blind Spot or Aperture Magazine. As an editor and an author, a focus of his work has been on the subject of how meaning is generated through association. Monographs of his photography include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), Contains: 3 Books (2016), Clayton’s Ascent (2018), The Medium is a Mess (2018), Picture Summer on Kodak Film (2020) and The Heart Is a Sandwich (2023). He is co-author with Tamara Shopsin of the photobook for children, This Equals That (2014), co-editor with Gregory Halpern of The Photographer’s Playbook (2014), guest editor of Der Greif Issue 11, editor of Photo No-Nos (2021), and co-editor with Julie Ault and Jordan Weitzman of Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us: Photographs by Corita (2023).
