Iceland One-Off - Asbyrgi Mushroom
My mother loved mushrooms. Even more than eating them, she liked how they looked. When in doubt, I’d buy her a mushroom nick-nack for her birthday. Always a card with a mushroom on it if I could (have you ever tried finding a mushroom-themed Christmas card?). To this day, I can’t see a mushroom trinket and not think about mom. Heck, sometimes I’m in a store buying mushrooms to cook for dinner and I think of her. Those moments bring me a lot of joy. So when we passed by this brilliant red mushroom in Asbyrgi, well I had to figure out how to photograph it.
I’ve made dozens of mushroom photographs in my life. Several just to print and show my mom. Many just to remember her by. This was one of those occasions. I could have done a close-up of them, but I’d done that before and I thought I’d try something different. Instead, I decided to show the mushroom in its environment, to show how prominent it presented itself, despite its comparative diminutive size (though compared to what you see in the stores, it made even a Portobello look small).
Composing the image had its challenges. Most of all, a few inches away from the mushrooms (just out of frame at the bottom) were other similar mushrooms that . . . hadn’t aged quite so gracefully. If I had to describe them in two words - downright ugly. No way I was going to include them. Then there was the foliage in the trees. We’d arrived a week or two too late for the best fall colors and a giant wind storm had wreaked havoc on most of the leaves. So the leaves are not evenly placed throughout the trees in the image. That was unfortunate.
No matter. This was a photograph made for mom, and she’d love the picture regardless. So I made it.
That is one of the things I love about photography. It is so many different things for different (even the same) people. It’s been referred to - positively and negatively - as the great democratic art. Positively, because it is accessible to all in so many different ways. Negatively, because, well it can’t be “art” if it is so accessible and easy to make an image (so some say). I have embraced the fact that it can be many things, and is many different things even to myself. Not all of my cherished pictures are what I consider a photograph (with a capital “P”), yet they still are still precious to me.
Sometimes, a photograph really needs to be nothing more than a loving reminder of your mom.