Mushrooms & Friends 3

Mushrooms & Friends 3 collects intimate portraits of wild mushrooms Phyllis Ma foraged in New York during the pandemic year of 2020. She photographs each specimen as a surreal still life, bathed in multicolored light: familiar gilled mushrooms next to fungi with stranger shapes, a stinkhorn and its eggs, a puffball with a lychee-like skin, cordyceps sprouting from insect exoskeletons.

The zine runs 32 pages of full-color photos on glossy stock, soft cover, staple-bound, at 8.5 by 11 inches. Ma self-published it in April 2021, printed in Switzerland; a second printing followed in March 2025.

Foraging gave this volume a narrower, more specific subject than the farm-sourced mushrooms of the first two books, and the isolation of 2020 shows in how closely and strangely each specimen is lit. Ma has continued the series with a fourth volume centered on Ganoderma, the reishi and lingzhi mushroom.