Jason Fulford: The Mushroom Collector

This publication reissues a beloved photobook classic―acknowledged as such by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in the third volume of ‘The Photobook: A History’―that has been out of print since the hardcover edition was published in 2010. As photographer Jason Fulford (born 1973) recently learned firsthand, mushrooms have a way of growing and spreading wherever they touch ground. It all started when a friend of Fulford’s gave him a box, found at a flea market, full of photos of mushrooms―unassuming pictures taken by an unknown but almost certainly amateur photographer, apparently as notes for some mycological studies. Fulford’s art photographs (aside from his well-known book Dancing Pictures, which depicted people getting down to their favorite songs) are usually of staid, quasi-mute objects: a smashed Dorito chip overrun with ants, two bronzed doorknobs spooning, the blank back of a street sign. Yet these mushroom images got stuck in Fulford’s mind, like a bad song sometimes does, and they started to grow in his own work. ‘The Mushroom Collector’ combines some of the original flea-market mushroom pictures with his own images and text by the artist about the project.