Mushrooms & Friends 2

Mushrooms & Friends 2 continues Phyllis Ma's self-published series, expanding on the photography of foraged and cultivated mushrooms in the same staged, saturated-color settings as the first volume. Familiar gilled mushrooms appear alongside spongy, stalkless, and club-shaped fungi, set against food props, a sliced orange dusted with turmeric, purple daisies on green sugar, the veined texture of a cabbage leaf, that push the images toward something closer to still life than field guide.

Like the first volume, it runs 32 pages of full-color photos on glossy stock, soft cover, staple-bound, at 8.5 by 11 inches. Ma released it in February 2020, printed in New York City, just before the pandemic reshaped the city she was photographing in.

The series continued with Mushrooms & Friends 3, shot during the 2020 lockdowns, and later volumes; together they track Ma's shift from studio-adjacent still life toward a more specific, place-bound record of foraging in New York.