While walking in public parks near her home in Melbourne, Ying Ang spotted fleshy spores poking through autumn leaves and spring grass. The photographer decided to document these distinctive growths, which soon had her thinking about the process of decay and regeneration.
Now compiled in a book titled Fruiting Bodies, Ying’s images glimpse a variety of common mushrooms from ground level. Her lens pokes through blades of grass to peer upwards at the spongy underbellies of the growths, capturing their unique textures and colors in impeccable detail.
Ying utilizes the collection as an opportunity to delve into ecofeminism and the relationship between productivity and fertility, a historically fraught link when considering a woman’s presumed role of wife and mother. She explains:
Like the female body, mushrooms have been understood and valued primarily through their reproductive function. Yet, beneath the surface, a vast underground mycelial network is vital in ways that defy conventional visibility: in care, in knowledge, in reciprocity.
Fruiting Bodies is published by Perimeter Editions, and you can find more from Ying on her website.
