In Fruiting Bodies, photographer Ying Ang rejects ‘fetishisation’ of mushrooms and of feminine magnificence

Melbourne photographer and writer Ying Ang was strolling round inner-city gardens after her son’s college drop-off when she turned so fascinated by the mushrooms she seen underfoot that her 20-minute walks started to spiral into into four-hour rambles.

She developed an intense fascination with mushrooms and started photographing them.

“The magic thing about photography is that you don’t really know what something looks like photographed until you photograph it,” Ang tells ABC Arts.

It turned out that, by means of her lens, mushrooms had lots to say.

“I find something very surprising about them,” Ang says. 

Ang photographed mushrooms over eight months in 2024, and the ensuing physique of photographic work, Fruiting Bodies, launched on the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles images competition in France earlier this month.

And it attracts a robust connection between mushrooms and the feminine physique.

Hidden power

Ang’s compelling photographic collection begins by confronting a wrestle she considers frequent: girls feeling they need to cling to the fading remnants of their youth.

“Is that all we are — defined by what we once had? Or is there a deeper worth waiting to be uncovered?” she asks.

Ang says there’s a “connection with lessons in the environment and lessons in feminism” — a faculty of pondering often known as ecofeminism. 

Using these notions as a basis, she highlights the transient great thing about mushrooms, utilizing them as metaphors for advanced concepts round feminine magnificence.

Female magnificence is commonly thought of fragile and one thing that diminishes with getting older, Ang says.

She writes in Fruiting Bodies:

Here is how the world will attempt to make you small.

Here is find out how to cease it.

Here is what you wouldn’t have to endure.

Ang finds a typical level between girls’s experiences and the huge underground mycelial community that helps mushrooms and the unseen world; there, she says, there may be hidden power and resilience.

The worth of a physique

Beyond the ladies in her life, who’re her “key inspiration”, Ang is impressed by authors comparable to Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk and “the richness of their interior landscape”.

As a lady and a mom, Ang felt a deep curiosity concerning the tales her personal physique held inside. “I mean, I’ve had a child, right? I’ve fulfilled my reproductive function, where is the value and function of my body?” she says.

Fruiting Bodies is an introspective journey, however it’s one designed to talk broadly.

Mushrooms, with their ephemeralness, are a reminder of the interconnectedness of all life varieties, Ang says.

She’s additionally pushing again towards the pattern of fetishising mushrooms in inventive imagery, a typical observe she encountered in researching her ebook. 

“It’s this full phallic pulsing at the peak of its reproductive state,” she says.

Similarly, she argues that there’s “a complete fetishisation of … our reproductive years as women”.

While Ang believes girls’s value is commonly tied to their youth and fertility, her work — against this — celebrates the worth of ladies past these parameters, together with their roles as storytellers, caregivers and very important hyperlinks between generations.

In Fruiting Bodies, every mushroom picture stands alone as a portrait, permitting readers to understand the fragile particulars and to discover a deeper significance.

The ebook is not only a set of images; it’s a journey into the center of what it means to exist, to be seen and to reclaim one’s narrative in a world that always overlooks the profound connections between life, demise and all the things in between.

“I wish for [readers] to discover a secret that perhaps they have always known,” Ang says. “I hope that individuals can meet me midway as I introduce an concept, the start of a thread to be unravelled.

Fruiting Bodies is out now from Perimeter Editions.