Photographer Reimagines Local Fruit ^{CEFR B1}

Marlon Rouse trained in print media and learned his craft under the demands of news photography. He later worked across corporate, food and portrait photography. This year he began showing a set of striking fruit photographs on Facebook and on his website.

The series deliberately moves away from a familiar Caribbean food aesthetic of appetite and abundance. Rouse presents fruit as specimens or organisms and uses lighting, framing and scale to suggest anatomy or unfamiliar life-forms. These choices make the images read more like study samples than pictures meant for eating.

Rouse describes the work as an enquiry into memory and youth and says he found the phrase "sacred objects" while reading the poet W. H. Auden. He says he did not pay much attention to local fruit as a child, but closer observation now raises questions about unrealised potential; he calls the photos "a statement of being, a two-way street, this."

The photographs remove cultural cues that might signal consumption or comfort and instead emphasise form, structure and process. Rouse says he was "seduced by light" and that "the light plays tricks on us." He also notes issues of discrimination, idealisation, colour and shape. He hopes to publish a book and to expand the gallery he has begun to share online.