Verses for Wild Grass – Urban Nature and an Imagined Jungle
With Verses for Wild Grasses, Alexandre Morelli presents images of plants photographed in gardens across the Paris region. Under his flashes, the vegetation becomes exuberant, evoking the imagined jungles of Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier.
Nature is the central subject of these photographs. The photographer reflects on the role of vegetation in urban environments, which—despite contemporary environmental discourse—is too often reduced to a merely decorative function: “For years I had railed against the concrete of my suburbs. I watched it grow in blocks, spreading everywhere my eyes could see. When I spoke about it, people would reply that trees would be planted to green the city, to ‘renaturalize’ it. I would find patches of green here and there, but everything felt so controlled… In all these attempts to reconcile city and nature, I saw nothing but a hygienic stage set—and very little wild grass.”
By favoring glossy print processes, the series Verses for Wild Grasses stands out for its particularly luminous images, marked by a sense of the fantastic, in which Alexandre Morelli renders the familiar strange.