Contemporary photography offers a renewed interpretation of the floral theme. Far from being purely ornamental, flowers have become a means of exploring life and experimenting with the image. Presented in the Jardin d’été, works by five international artists show how the floral motif continues to generate new meanings within contemporary photographic practice.

Framed by ecological, political and historical concerns, images of flowers take on a different tone. What may at first appear to be an exploration of form and color often carries a critical undercurrent. Whether through metaphor or more direct forms of representation, these works engage with their subject while exploring what photographic images can do.

For Alice Pallot and Anaïs Tondeur, working with living matter goes hand in hand with photographic experimentation, often in environments that seem inhospitable to growth. Yet even in landscapes shaped by extractivism, pollution and radioactive contamination, unexpected forms of life emerge from what anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls a “third nature.”

If a “language of flowers” still exists, it no longer speaks in the register of conventional sentiment. Jiang Zhi’s burning flowers evoke the memory of a love ritual. Matei Bejenaru works with scientific instruments used to observe life, blurring the boundary between truth and fiction. Suzanne Lafont brings “companion plants” into urban spaces, making overlooked flowers visible in everyday surroundings and countering “plant blindness,” our cultural indifference to plant life.

What better place than a garden to express this need for reconciliation?

Beata Nowak and Michel Poivert