Pyrocumulus, an Atlas of Mushrooms is a hybrid work at the crossroads of experimental photography, ecological inquiry, and critical fable. Photographer Valia Russo and graphic designer Émilie Noyer explore an uncanny analogy: that of the nuclear mushroom cloud and the fungal mushroom — bound by form, yet opposed in their relation to life.
Russo feeds images of nuclear explosions into mushroom-identification apps. The algorithms, trained to recognize edible fungi, mistake the destructive cloud for a boletus or chanterelle. The bomb becomes a mushroom. This formal glitch opens up a deeper question: what happens when technology fails to distinguish life from catastrophe? When destruction takes on the face of the familiar?
But the book goes beyond visual irony. Noyer’s accompanying text anchors the project in the post-Fukushima landscape, where fungi have become organic sensors of radioactivity. Their mycelial networks, hidden just below the forest floor, absorb and accumulate radioactive particles. In affected areas, residents — equipped with Geiger counters — have turned to foraging as a form of survival science. Some try to “decontaminate” mushrooms with rice cookers or dryers, shifting the risk from food to air, to water, to neighbors. Each attempt to purify raises the same haunting question: if radiation leaves one place, where does it go next?
Drawing on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, Pyrocumulus ultimately suggests another narrative: one of fragile resilience. Like the matsutake mushroom that thrives in disturbed forests, fungi can be both sign and agent of life in ruined landscapes. This book becomes a dissonant atlas — where the atomic cloud mirrors a living form, where contamination maps meet organic survival, and where the absurd and the essential are never far apart.
