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Psilocybin Research

Image credits

About this siteReviewed

Where the photographs come from

Every photograph on Psilocybin Research is a real photograph, taken by a named person, published under a license that permits this use. Most are Creative Commons images from Wikimedia Commons, where credit is a condition of the license rather than a courtesy. There is no stock photography on this site and no AI-generated or computer-rendered imagery.

This page exists for the same reason the references at the foot of every article do. A site that asks readers to check its claims should make its pictures checkable too — so each credit below links to the source file and to the license deed, and you can confirm both without taking our word for either.

We do not use paid stock libraries. Their licenses are per-use and their imagery of this subject is, almost without exception, either a laboratory scene staged by a model or a mushroom lit in neon — the visual grammar of the marketing this publication exists to correct. A correctly identified specimen photographed by a mycologist tells the reader something true. A stock photograph of a scientist holding a flask of colored liquid does not.

If you are the photographer of an image here and something in the credit is wrong, write to [email protected] and we will fix it, or remove the image, the same day.

Photographs in use

6 photographs currently published.

  • Five slender caramel-capped mushrooms with pale wavy stems growing among dried beach grass and orange conifer needles.

    Psilocybe azurescens fruiting in coastal grass and conifer litter. It grows wild along the Oregon and Washington coast — which is a fact about the mushroom, not about Oregon's law: the state's regulated program uses cultivated Psilocybe cubensis, and picking these remains an offense.

    Photographer
    Caleb Brown
    Taken
    2018-11-03

    Changes we made: Resized for the web. Not cropped or retouched.

    Appears on /science

  • A cluster of five glossy tawny-brown mushrooms with smooth rounded caps growing from mossy rotting wood.

    Galerina marginata, the funeral bell. It contains the same amatoxins as the death cap, it grows on wood in the same months and the same places as several Psilocybe species, and at a glance it looks like them. This is the single most important photograph on this page.

    Photographer
    Ryan Hodnett
    Taken
    2017-10-27

    Changes we made: Resized for the web. Not cropped or retouched.

    Appears on /psilocybin-safety-and-risks

  • A participant wearing eyeshades lies on a couch under a blue blanket in a plainly furnished room while two session monitors sit beside them.

    A psilocybin session room at Johns Hopkins, photographed in 2008. A participant in eyeshades, two monitors present for the whole session, a couch and a lamp. Nearly every widely reproduced trial result you will read about came out of rooms that look like this one.

    Photographer
    Matthew W. Johnson
    Taken
    2008

    Changes we made: Resized for the web. Not cropped or retouched.

    Appears on /psilocybin-clinical-trials, /psilocybin-therapy-cost

  • Two small white pharmacy bottles on a pale surface, the front one labeled for clinical trial use with psilocybin dosing instructions.

    Trial medication from PSILODEP-RCT at Imperial College London: psilocybin as an investigational medicinal product, in a labeled bottle with a EudraCT number and a named principal investigator on it. This is what the drug looks like inside the research this site reports on.

    Photographer
    Thomas Angus, Imperial College London
    Taken
    2019-08-21

    Changes we made: None. Published at the size the source provides.

    Appears on /psilocybin-drug-development-pipeline, /psilocybin-depression-research

  • An antique hand-colored botanical engraving of eight small ochre-capped mushrooms with long wavy stems, arranged on cream paper with handwritten Latin names beneath.

    James Sowerby's hand-colored engraving, published in London on 1 January 1800. Figures 1, 2 and 3 at the lower right are the liberty cap — then Agaricus semilanceatus — drawn beside Stropharia semiglobata. The annotations in pencil are the naturalist's own.

    Photographer
    James Sowerby
    Taken
    1800-01-01

    Changes we made: Plate margins trimmed and resized for the web. Color untouched.

    Appears on /how-psilocybin-works

  • A Victorian lithographic plate on olive ground showing nine liberty cap mushrooms at various stages, one sectioned lengthwise, with a scatter of spores at lower right.

    Mordecai Cubitt Cooke drew this plate from liberty caps collected in a Manchester pasture in October 1876, down to the spore print at lower right. Note the word at the top of the plate: poisonous. That was the settled scientific view of this mushroom eighty years before anyone isolated psilocybin from it.

    Photographer
    Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
    Taken
    1876-10

    Changes we made: Page edge cropped and resized for the web. Color untouched.

    Appears on /what-people-get-wrong