Radioactive mushrooms, white backgrounds, and the forest as contaminated archive
Symphony - mushrooms from the forest is a 2019 softcover photobook by Takashi Homma, published by Case Publishing. The project takes radioactive mushrooms as its subject — gathered across four geographies — and photographs them against a white background, isolating each specimen with a precision closer to taxonomy than to landscape photography. Interspersed forest views hold the environmental context without resolving it into narrative.
About the work
The structural reference point is Ed Ruscha's typological method: repetition as a form of inquiry rather than illustration. Homma photographs mushrooms collected in Scandinavia, Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Stony Point — each location carrying its own history of nuclear contamination or proximity to it. The white-background images recur throughout the sequence with the regularity of specimens in a field guide, while the forest inserts introduce scale, weather, and geography without explaining the contamination they imply.
The result is a transnational document that moves between foraging culture, radiation, and ecological memory without collapsing any of them into the others. The book remains visually flat and procedural even as the subject matter accumulates weight across its 296 pages.
The softcover edition
At 328 × 258 × 25 mm, the softcover edition is a large-format object. The sequence of 139 images across 296 pages gives the book a measured, expansive rhythm — the white-background photographs return at intervals that feel calibrated rather than arbitrary. Readers comparing formats may also wish to consult Symphony - mushrooms from the forest (Hardcover). Both editions are available within the Photobooks section of the catalogue.
