Photographer Reimagines Local Fruit ^{CEFR B2}

Marlon Rouse, a Trinidadian photographer who began his career in print media and under the pressures of news photography, has been posting a new series that asks viewers to rethink local produce. He later worked across corporate, food and portrait photography, and this year he put a set of striking fruit images on Facebook and on his website.

The photographs reject the familiar Caribbean food aesthetic of appetite and abundance. By treating fruit as specimens or organisms and by controlling lighting, framing and scale, Rouse makes many images read as almost anatomical or xenobiological, evoking cross-sections and unfamiliar life forms rather than market displays.

He frames the series as an enquiry into memory and youth and says he encountered the phrase "sacred objects" while reading W. H. Auden. Rouse admits he did not notice local fruit much as a child; closer observation in modern light has raised questions about unrealised potential and identity, and he calls the work "a statement of being, a two-way street, this."

The images deliberately remove cultural cues of consumption or comfort and instead emphasise form, structure and process, which can leave them clinical, melancholic or ambiguous. Rouse says he was "seduced by light" and that "the light plays tricks on us," and he draws attention to discrimination, idealisation, colour and shape in how objects are seen. He hopes to publish a book, notes that photography in Trinidad and Tobago is still under-appreciated locally, and intends to continue exploring light and form while expanding the online gallery he has begun.