On March 11, 2011, a tsunami brought on by a severe earthquake caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima. More than 100,000 people had to leave their homes by order of the Japanese government, which also prohibited the collection and consumption of mushrooms in the area because of radiation. Photographer Takashi Homma visited and photographed the forests of Fukushima in the autumn of 2011, six months after the accident.
Fungi are one of the fastest absorbing organisms of radiation. Various types of mould were discovered inside the broken, highly radioactive reactor number 4 at Chernobyl, where it was found that they are capable of converting radiation into chemical energy for growth. Mushrooms From the Forest suggests that we should see mushrooms as possible allies for life among the ruins of capitalism, both in the short and long term.
The series is not only made up of photographs taken immediately after a nuclear disaster; it also includes images taken 25 years later in the forests of Chernobyl, Sweden and Finland, where the authorities regulated the consumption of mushrooms because of the radioactive cloud from the Ukrainian accident in 1986.
The project is completed with photographs taken in Stony Point, USA, the artists’ commune where the experimental composer John Cage developed his fervent interest in mycology. In this work, following in the footsteps of Cage, who first collected mushrooms out of hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Homma aims to listen and learn to live with the mushrooms that inhabit the forests and make them possible.