Some photographers take pretty pictures of mushrooms. And then there are photographers who, when they point their camera at a mushroom, are simultaneously documenting a species, an ecosystem, centuries of cultural relationship between that species and the communities that know it, and an ephemeral moment—because mushrooms last days, sometimes hours. César Kevin Pérez Pacheco is one of the latter.
From Curiosity to the Field
César Kevin is a designer, artist, biologist, and mycologist, specializing in Mexican wild mushrooms. His career combines taxonomic rigor with an educational vocation: he has published research in Scientia Fungorum—the journal of the Mexican Society of Mycology, a peer-reviewed publication of the UNAM Institute of Biology—and at the same time has produced visual art and outreach pieces that bring mycology to audiences who would never open a scientific journal.
His fieldwork has taken him to the forests of Oaxaca (especially the Sierra Sur and the San Esteban Atatlahuca region), the State of Mexico, Puebla, and other regions of high fungal diversity. Each field trip combines taxonomic research—species identification, distribution documentation, relationships with local communities—with photographic hunting for images that capture the specificity and rarity of each species.
The Poster of Edible Wild Mushrooms of Mexico
His most well-known work is probably the Poster of Edible Wild Mushrooms of Mexico, created together with Alonso Cortés-Pérez and American mycologist Alan Rockefeller. The poster documents the most popular and commercialized fungal species in Mexico—those found in seasonal markets, those that nanacateras bring to the tianguis, those that families have eaten in August for generations—with field photography, taxonomic determination, and common names in Spanish.
About the process, César Kevin described it this way: "Behind each photograph there is a great deal of effort, dedication, and passion for mushrooms, from the planning of forest exploration and research, to selection and digital editing."
The poster includes the most common, popular, and commercialized species in the country, with their taxonomic determination and the most frequent names in Spanish. It was made possible thanks to the collaboration and contribution of communities, forests, friends, and colleagues—a way of doing science that explicitly recognizes that knowledge about Mexican mushrooms belongs not only to academic institutions, but also to the communities that have known them for centuries.
Science and Art: Silkscreen as a Format
In addition to photography, César Kevin works with silkscreen—a handcrafted printing process that involves designing an image specifically for that medium and producing it in a limited edition. César Kevin's silkscreen prints are collector's items that document specific mushrooms with the same identification rigor as his scientific photographs, but with the formal language of graphic art.
This double life—scientist and artist—is not a contradiction. It is a response to a real problem: the science of mushrooms is extraordinarily rich, but its communication formats (articles in peer-reviewed journals, monographs, taxonomic keys) are inaccessible to the general public. Art can do what formal science does not: generate wonder, desire, identification. Make someone who has never read a mycology article want to know what that mushroom is called, where it comes from, what it does.
The Oaxaca Mushroom Poster: Documenting What May Disappear
César Kevin also participated in the poster of 59 photographs of endemic mushrooms from San Esteban Atatlahuca, Oaxaca—a project that documented four years of research in the Mixtec communities of that municipality. The poster is simultaneously a scientific document, an outreach material for the 11 communities of the municipality, and an act of recognition of the ethnomycological knowledge of local communities.
The project was initiated by Osvaldo Sandoval Bautista, who had the support of César Kevin in the design part, along with Alan Rockefeller in the taxonomic determination. It is a model of collaboration that combines local indigenous knowledge, field photography, and academic taxonomy—without any of the three elements dominating or subsuming the others.
Why This Type of Work Matters
Mexico has an estimated 200,000 species of fungi—most of them undescribed. Its forests harbor extraordinary fungal diversity that faces increasing pressures: deforestation, climate change, loss of ethnomycological knowledge from the communities that know them. Documenting this heritage—with scientific rigor, with photographic beauty, with connection to communities—is an act of cultural and natural conservation at the same time.
César Kevin's work is part of that response. Not as a solitary project, but as part of a network of mycologists, photographers, communities, and communicators who are building, piece by piece, an archive of the Mexican fungal universe before parts of it disappear.
References
- Pérez-Pacheco CK, Cortés-Pérez A, Rockefeller A. Hongos Silvestres Comestibles de México (Part 1) [poster]. 2019–2020. Project review
→ See César Kevin's collaborations with Simbiosis
→ Hongosto—the wild mushroom season in Mexico
→ Nanacateras—the guardians of the Mexican fungal forest