When fledgling photographer Taylor Lockwood moved to Mendocino, California, in 1984, he noticed mushrooms, lots of them, right outside the door of his cabin in the woods. He’d never seen so many in one place except in a grocery store.
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Lockwood reveled in the solitude, but he liked getting together with friends to display his latest photographic bounty, and he found the easiest way to do so was with a slide show. To liven things up, he added a sound track of mainly Baroque music, and within a year he’d landed a gig at the Los Angeles Mycological Society’s annual fair. As word of Lockwood’s show swirled among elite mycological circles, his audiences occasionally numbered more than 500 people. Thanks to his performing past, Lockwood was unfazed. “I’m up onstage and people often treat me like a star, but this is better than the rock ‘n’ roll days,” he says. “There’s less equipment to take around, and the audience is a lot broader and a lot more appreciative of what they’re seeing.”
Last year Lockwood went on the most ambitious of all his trips so far–Thailand, southeast China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. There are an estimated 15,000 mushroom species worldwide, and Lockwood encountered some of the rarest, including the pink pleurotus and purple amanita, during his five-month trek. But it was in Malaysia’s Taman Negara forest that he made his most important find–a mushroom he hasn’t been able to identify. He brought the specimen back with him and is displaying it on his current “Endless Foray” slide-show tour, which is sure to draw some expert able to figure out what it is or confirm that Lockwood’s discovered a new species. “Even though I don’t have the name for it yet, people’s reactions have been amazing,” he says. “It’s because they’re seeing something they’ve never seen before and may never get to see again.”
