Gallery: Decades of wild mushroom photography on display in Saaremaa
On the Western Estonian island of Saaremaa, nearly 300 photographs are now on display at a local nature center, spotlighting decades of work by mycologist Vello Liiv.
The exhibition at Viidumäe Nature Center opened Sunday, and unlike most mushroom displays, may remain open to visitors for a year or more.
"Look, there they are," Liiv remarked in passing when he spotted mushrooms growing beside a tree stump outside the center.
"When you've spent nearly half your life walking with your head down, you can't really start looking up anymore," he quipped. "You keep seeing the grass and that part of the forest floor."
Still, the nearly 300 photographs on display represent only a small fraction of the mushrooms he has photographed over more than half a century. The University of Tartu's collections, he noted, contain around 3,000 species.
The Viidumäe exhibition is both artistic and scientific in nature, said artist Anna Talvi, who worked on the display.
"The way Vello photographs these mushrooms is beautiful in its own right," Talvi said. "But he also photographs and arranges them in ways that most clearly highlight each species' unique characteristics."
Liiv said he has never deliberately tried to make mushrooms look beautiful. Many of the species he has photographed, however, are ones he has only ever encountered once.
"Oh, there are so many of them," he said. Of the roughly 3,000 species, he estimates he has seen, photographed and identified about 2,500 only once before adding them to a herbarium.
The mushrooms people typically recognize as mushrooms, he added, actually only make up a much smaller bunch of around 300 species.
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Editor: Aleksander Krjukov, Aili Vahtla
