On a damp afternoon last Sunday, the members of the New York Mycological Society set up a cluster of tented tables at Randall’s Island Urban Farm in New York to host the largest event in the society’s sixty-year history—the New York City Fungus Festival. According to Sigrid Jakob, the president of the NYMS, New York City’s last recorded mushroom festival was held in 1982 to celebrate the 70th birthday of one of the society’s founders, the avant-garde composer John Cage.
Four days prior to last weekend’s festival, the 1,300 tickets allotted for the event unexpectedly sold out. While our culture’s mushroom obsession may feel like it has reached peak saturation (see: mushroom-shaped lamps, mushroom motifs in fashion, and the continued research into psilocybin), the overwhelming interest in the festival is a sign that a thriving community of mushroom enthusiasts simply want to go outside and see the real thing. Among them is the photographer Adam Whyte, who recently published In Search of Fungi, an ethereal collection of photographs he shot while mushroom foraging in upstate New York, not far from where John Cage did most of his own foraging.
At the festival, Whyte roved from table to table, photographing events like “Observational Mushroom Drawing,” “Fungi Identification and Nomenclature,” and “The Mycocosmos Beneath Our Feet.” He seized on moments of joy around him—when people became so captivated by the fungi in their hands that they may have forgotten, for a moment, that they were on an island in the middle of one of the densest cities in the country. On several occasions, he noticed festival goers peering into mushroom caps through glass loupes, like jewelers inspecting fine gems.
“This world can be so microscopic,” he told me while reflecting on his love of fungi. “It’s an invisible world to us. It’s mostly beneath the surface.” Taken together, Whyte’s photos paint an endearing portrait of New Yorkers in search of a piece of that invisible world.
