A desolate grey casts its monochromatic palette over the exterior of the multi-building complex. Like a New Yorker, incognizant of the whipping winds billowing from nearby Gowanus Bay, Industry City wears its somber coat proudly, reflective of the overcast sky. But the belly of the industrial behemoth is extraordinarily juxtaposed. Each modular building is a heterogeneous mix of different worlds: a variety of stores and other consumer services dot the commercial space in an ever-rotating bazaar of millennial consumption.
Even among the kaleidoscopic ornaments that adorned the capitalist tree, one star shone with inescapable brightness and ingenuity. On the second floor of Building 5, atop a spiraling staircase, down a narrow hallway mirrored by a Japanese ceramic studio and a craft stationery store, in suite 2-B-228, was the piercing red sign of the Odd Apples photo gallery, a cultivated tribute to the world’s most iconic fruit.
There are over seven thousand cultivars of apples in the world. Give or take, the science is still fuzzy on that one. That’s what William Mullan would say to those interested in his obsession. Coated by a light-brown jacket patterned with intricate grids, his small frame was boxed in by two padded shoulders that sloped down to his pale-grey-jean-clad legs. A shock of semi-wavy, brown hair arranged itself neatly on his head, following the contours down a teardrop face until it connected with a prairie of less dense, but equally brown beard. The four white walls of 2B228 lit up his white turtleneck on all sides.
The curator of apples had a bouncy lightness in the way he spoke and moved about, an artistic statement punctuated by two subtly gleaming rings in his earlobes. A self-contained vivaciousness emanated from his presence. Though short in stature, Mullan carried himself with elevated sophistication that never bled into snobbery.
“What do you think?” he mused, mostly to himself. His brown, button eyes lasered in on a large patch of white near the entrance. APPLES OF THE FUTURE, the vinyl letters proudly proclaimed.
Hammer in hand, Mullan was applying the final touches to the exhibition. At 5pm on a gloomy Saturday afternoon, his vision was an hour away from its unveiling. Most of the mounted photographs stood ready, dressed accordingly with a custom font. Odd Sans was the tentative name used by Andrea Trabucco-Campos, the designer that helped make this gallery a reality. It resembled the iconic New Yorker typesetting and gave life to the vivid descriptions of each apple’s flavor profile and far-flung origins. No two apples were the same. None of them are commonly found in supermarkets. To notice their wacky shapes and unorthodox color patterns is one thing; to successfully distill beauty beyond their anomalous physical traits and present it through photographs is another.
Mullan has always been a visual person, even at a young age. His childhood drawing tendencies translated to a stint in film school. After eschewing that career path for a more practical option as a struggling artist in New York City, his desire to work in food – especially with production and design – led to his current post as the brand manager of Raaka, the Brooklyn-based chocolate maker. Frustrated with the often-delayed schedule of photographers, he opted to pick up a camera for the sake of self-sourcing his own duties. After shadowing a photographer as a tutorial, Mullan’s multi-faceted responsibilities in marketing and community outreach blossomed into other creative avenues, one of which framed his hobby into an art project far beyond his expectations.
The pomological path leading up to this particular niche was more straightforward than the festive gala of Galas would suggest. Growing up in the United Kingdom, Mullan’s interest in rare and unknown strains of the fruit kingdom’s poster child sprouted with the island nation’s abundance of cider apples.
“So this is the Egremont Russet.” Mullan pulled out a wilted-gold sphere from his bag. “I remember seeing this apple and thinking what on earth. I kind of knew that there was a reason this apple is here. There had to be flavor.”
Roughly a third the size of the ubiquitous American staple, the potato-esque fruit scarred by lenticels hardly resembled its namesake. It lacked the gleaming red hue and bodacious curves of its commonplace cousin, an absence shared by most, if not all, the unconventional subjects present that day.
While his hometown germinated his initial curiosity in the ruby icon, it was his collegiate years in California – with its egregious dearth of apple varietals – that rooted Mullan’s fruity fixations. Then, upon discovering New York’s diverse haven for the outcasted apples of his eye, the saccharine symbol of the supermarket became a full-blown passion.
“I spend most of my savings buying apples,” Mullan confessed. There was no doubt. He could name most of the specimen he procured with dexterous ease – taste, texture, origin, commonly found colorations and patterns, orchard location. Calling it a hobby would be an understatement, or even a disservice, for the level of details which Mullan could rattle off on a whim.
“How many people in the world can name all of these apples? Only like six, seven people.” This was Gidon Coll of Original Sin Cider. The gallery was open now.
Coll, a long-time partner of Mullan’s in his project, had arrived first. The cidermaker, a slight European tinge to his voice, was immediately drawn to the display table. Many of the subjects available for sampling and viewing at the gallery, as well as testing specimen for Mullan’s photo sessions, came from his test orchard. Dubbed the “Edible Museum of Apples”, Coll’s Hudson Valley Apple Project – featuring over 150 varieties of the fruit – dovetailed with Mullan’s artistic dissemination. One was a visual feast, the other a literal one.
“They’re awesome,” Coll said of the photographs. “They’re really awesome.” The smile that he carried the moment he walked through the door never left. He floated around the room, eyes eagerly absorbing all they could; topics about apples, unsolicited, spilled forth with the ineluctable zeal of an eight-year industry veteran.
An hour into the gallery, the space now teemed with Mullan’s friends and associates, mixed in with a couple of curious passersby. A family of three eagerly awaited decadent slices of a Pink Pearl to be served, mesmerized by their rose-pink advertisement of ambrosia. Associates from Raaka and Industry City employees crowded around the white table, where darkly translucent cider bottles offered sinful incentives for a more efficient mechanism of apple consumption.
Crescent-moon slices, not yet pounded and pressed into alcohol, peacocked in front of photographers and designers – the same fruit fanned out in a spectrum of complexions. Unsliced models – round and stout; oval and elongated; compacted and seemingly wilted; those with obvious lenticels and those without; spotted and contorted; smooth with wax like shine; fossilized and pocked; siamesed and star-shaped; fresh and past their prime – reflected the sundry collection of admirers now circulating the twenty-by-ten exhibit. Meanwhile, enlarged, two-dimensional photographic counterparts accentuated the white walls with dazzling contrast.
Mullan, playing the tireless role of host-curator-tour guide (“This is really hard,” he later said), demanded his wide-eyed patrons return the granted they’ve so easily taken with the fruit. He loaded his impassioned sermons – “The terroir of a place makes a cultivar” – with researched statistics, and imbued his arguments with passionate gesticulations, firing off soundbites that drew engaged oo’s and aah’s from his enraptured audience.
The apples are indeed odd. They’re also beautiful and complex. But just as paramount to the question of how this project came to fruition is why Mullan considered it a mission worthy of apple-filled fridges. Beyond the successful virality of his Instagram account that led to a sold-out photography book; beyond the sequel in the making and his profile in the New York Times Magazine; beyond the gallery, and research trips to orchards and greenmarkets, the underlying impetus is largely tied to the history of the fruit and its rise to become the ruby orb known today.
“We do something with food that is creative, that is expressive, that is cultural and regional. No other animal does that,” Mullan gazed at the spread of apples before him. “And because of that, not only do we have a special relationship with how we cook and how we share food, but also our relationship with the things that we plant.”
Apples are the most recognizable fruits in the world. It is New York City’s most famous nickname. It is often a basic vocabulary word taught in introductory foreign language courses. It is synonymous with one of the most well-known Biblical stories, and one of the most well-known tech companies in the world. It poisoned a Disney princess and helped discover gravity; it “spoils the whole barrel”, “falls far (or not far) from the tree”, and “keeps the doctor away”. The apple’s renown derived from its ubiquity in both real life and the cultural zeitgeist.
“The story of apples is really the story of us,” said Mullan. “Apples have evolved with people. People have evolved with apples.”
It is this symbiotic relationship – not just with apples, but with many foods – that transcribed Mullan’s artistic ethos. The co-evolutionary journey between man, his alteration of nature, and the consequent adaptation of its inhabitants colored Mullan’s worldview, along with his pomaceous photos.
In Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire”, he traced the origin of Eden’s downfall to the mountains of Kazakhstan, where Malus sieversii, the wild apple, would eventually give rise to Malus domestica.
When the Chinese discovered the grafting method, it enabled the domestication – and subsequent promulgation – of man’s best fruit friend. By inserting a piece of wood from a desirable parental tree into another’s trunk, the latter’s hybrid joint would bear fruits that resembled the former. From there, the apple’s global passage officially began. By way of the Silk Road, the Greeks and the Romans molded the mountainous cultivar into more delicious specimen. Then the spread of civilization propagated the seeds through the warring empires of Old-World Europe, and eventually across the Atlantic with the Puritanical predecessors of modern-day Americans.
Human ingenuity and hybridization shaped the large, spherical modern form of the apple. But its adaptation to foreign lands was largely rooted in its own genetic resilience. To settle New World America, apple trees turned to their wild roots in sexual reproduction, spreading their progeny – with the help of pollinators and wind – with good old fashioned, pollen-to-seed action. No artificial grafting, no Frankensteinian branching of divergent characteristics. The humble apple tapped into its storied, Eurasian-based past while adopting the wilds of its new home, crystallizing a new identity in a foreign land.
“The apple in America became a parable,” Pollan wrote.
Like many of America’s most star-spangled products – the pizza, the hot dog, the French fry, among others – the apple is distinctly American, yet foreign in origin. Every bit an early settler as the wayfarers on the Mayflower, it was one of America’s earliest immigrant success stories.
And as waves of immigrant culture built up the country, brick by brick, so too did specific cultivars disseminate, seed by seed. Colonists had no access to sugar in eighteenth century America, so the demand for the succulent ball of fructose drove the development of orchards throughout early settlements. Thousands of types were eventually grown. In fact, the United States Department of Agriculture documented more than 17,000 different named apple varietals in the years between 1804 and 1904, a period of time fruit historians coined, “The Golden Age of Pomology”. More than two hundred years before the opening of the Odd Apples gallery, the apple boom had prophesized – and presented – the incredible population diversity that would come to define the DNA of what was then a nascent nation of immigrant settlers.
“My biggest challenge of this project is letting go,” Mullan said. Palming a Rocksbury Russet, he turned the golden orb in his hand. Placing the specimen delicately on its side, he grabbed his blocky, jet-black Canon EOS 7D – Snap! An ephemeral flash filled the room. A long, orange cable snaked from the camera to an Apple laptop nearby, where the image snapped onto the screen almost immediately. The gold popped against the purple backdrop, construction paper pilfered from Raaka’s stockpiles. “Every apple to me still has potential.”
Mullan’s makeshift photo studio consisted of a single white table set against the wall of the second-floor office at Raaka’s chocolate factory. The heavy decadence of cocoa and wafts of alcohol perfumed the air. On the apple catwalk sat a white cardboard square for bouncing light and a rack of silver, parallel cylinders for hanging up paper backdrops.
He took a couple more photos: snap, snap, snap. With one hand, he grabbed the tall lighting pole with an attached lamp head and tilted it forty-five degrees, bathing the regal fruit in even more golden ambience. With the other, he held the camera up to his eye, head and body both hunched over and angled sideways. Just as the perilous balancing act threatened to topple over – Snap! The camera took a bite.
Despite the haphazard setup of the “studio”, the images harvested from Mullan’s lens are anything but pedestrian. He has no real creative process, (“I look at the apples, listen to some music, and feel it out.”) but thousands of photos have honed his movements and understanding of each individual apple’s most tasteful – and tasty-looking – attributes.
Taking a brief respite, Mullan sat in front of a small, 2-foot refrigerator. Inside were shelves of apples – a subzero mausoleum of subjects, unlit and uneaten. He took out one after another, naming each endearingly as it passed through his hands. Even ones that harbored few differences from another, he could distinguish without hesitation. Soon, a small pile of fruits – all manners of oddities – lay at his feet.
“I love them. They look so different, each one,” Mullan said. The giving tree and his children of the harvest. Eventually, he selected a few by some unknown process of elimination.
“I love all apples; but not all of them translate that sense of wonder visually.” He almost seemed apologetic. Intrinsic to his mission statement is the conflict between his desire to give every apple the attention it deserves and his own artistic sensibilities. This is the material limitations of a world cruel to artists; so, choices must be made.
Much of society is ignorant of this sentiment. In the century since the Golden Age, efforts at promoting monocultural dominance have largely erased the apple’s genetic time capsule. In order to attain the most optimal yields with the broadest appeals in the most profitable markets, apple producers have finessed the Chinese grafting method down to a $4 billion a year science. The top sellers every year rarely deviate: Gala. Red Delicious. Fuji. Granny Smith. Honey-Crisp. Engineered as generic assembly-line clones, these titans of pomology have hijacked the fruit zeitgeist. Apples now must be either red or green; shapes have to be plump and round, texturally smooth and pleasant to hold. Lenticels and wrinkles are badges of shame, while a dull, waxy veneer indicated quality. The genetically encyclopedic bushels that hitched a ride with early American settlers have been cast into the uncertain waters of the endangered list.
On a sociological and anthropological level, the apple’s world tour paralleled homo sapiens advancement. On a genetic level, the two species also bear similar traits. Like us, every seed in the apple is blessed with heterozygosity, the genetic capability for generating an entirely unique individual within its God-given blueprints. But unlike us, the apple is a natural-born teenage rebel; its adoption of parental traits borders on the extreme, bearing fruits vastly different from its progenitors.
While this might account for the cosmic number of varietals that exploded centuries ago, such unpredictable variability also runs counter to the principles of human-selected agricultural practices. Empires were built on the ability of humans to select for efficient traits. And that meant reining in the inherent wildness.
“The average American has had only six varieties in their lifetimes,” Coll said.
Conservation through artistic inspiration may seem abstract in nature. Realistically, there is only so much emotional tangibility that can come with still images, however rousing the subject matter may be. The challenge is amplified with an apple, the most generic of fruits. But beauty in the mundane, in its often-unseen forms, may draw an ironic appeal. Everybody knows what an apple is. Everybody has eaten one before. Wresting long-held beliefs and bygone conclusions into an introspection of our roots necessitates a renewed celebration of diversity.
“I guess my goal is to show people that there are more apples than you see at the supermarket,” Mullan said. “That they’re all amazing and have different uses. What might not be a good apple for fresh eating is a great apple for cooking or is a great apple for cider.”
Mullan conceded that eventually this project will end. His deep dives into the botanical rabbit hole may always define a core aspect of his identity, but the thematic relevance of man and fruit will fade. For him, that’s a scary aspect of facing his own creativity. But for now, the lens of the camera will project a slice of the world that few people know, or even think about. To tell the stories of, to fix what is wrong with, and highlight the good in how food came to be – therein lies the significance of his work.
“You can really look at the way the world works, and has worked, by looking at food,” Mullan said. “Any food, any problems.”
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