Plhandts

Plhandts is a series of photographs comparing organic forms, features, and functions. It playfully challenges the perception of urban plants as static, ornamental objects, by aligning them with one of the human body's most active and dexterous parts – our hands. The photographer is also the subject: as such, the series serves to document a personal exploration of the extent to which human beings can assimilate into any environment.

The title of each image implies a gesture – such as holding, punching, reaching, catching, caressing, or scooping – to emphasise the plants' potentiality for action, and interaction with their surroundings. Simultaneously, the series reflects on human beings' capacity for strength and delicacy, softness and sharpness, nurturing and destroying – especially insofar as we exercise them on our environment. In effect, these photographs seek to subvert assumptions about the speed, movements and functions of these distinct organic entities, by embodying their similitude during a single moment in time.

Shot on Polaroid Originals 600 film using a 1982 Polaroid SLR 680 camera, each photograph is also a unique object, exposed by the same sunlight that their subjects used to photosynthesise. The Polaroids are cultivated according to given aesthetic criteria (tonal variation, exposure, framing, focus) – yet, as with plants, chemical and environmental variations inherently result in irregularities that are instantaneous, irreversible, and unique to each one.

Created in Marrakesh, Morocco during a two month stay at the beginning of 2020, the series resulted from a joyous exploration of the riad: a form of traditional Moroccan architecture, which features a central courtyard open to the elements. Coming from a Western perspective – accustomed to a strict architectural distinction between inside and outside spaces – the riad offered a fresh opportunity to interact with nature, appreciate its dynamism, and reconsider its role in urban and residential contexts.

Shot against neutral backgrounds, the interaction between the photographer's hand and the native flora is deliberately abstracted from its setting. Yet this serves to underscore the series' purpose as a geographical study from an explicitly individual perspective, which has the potential to be conducted in other places.