Hotel Oracle

A visual meditation on the cosmos, superstition, and the sacred, threading photographs made across twelve countries into a loose meditation on belief.

Hotel Oracle opens on the line "My neighbor June believes in Zeus" and proceeds from there as a sequence of pictures searching out the prophetic and the numinous inside ordinary, even banal, settings. A 99-cent store, in this method, stands as plausibly for the cosmos as any temple. The photographs, edited by Lorenzo de Rita, were made in the United States, Canada, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland, South Korea, Japan, Hungary, India, Bermuda, and Germany. They are sequenced without captions so that coincidence and pattern do the work of narrative. The Soon Institute published the 144-page hardcover in 2013 in an edition of 1,000 copies.

Fulford, a photographer and co-founder of the press J&L Books, built his reputation on this kind of open-ended, associative sequencing rather than single iconic images. Hotel Oracle followed earlier books including Sunbird, Crushed, Raising Frogs for $$$, and The Mushroom Collector, and preceded his later MACK title The Heart Is a Sandwich, which extends the same method into prose-inflected short stories.