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Review
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The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones by Sean Sexton and Robert Flynn Johnson, preface by Alice Waters, was published by Thames and Hudson, 1998.
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Other articles by Richard West
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Digging Ground
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The photographs of Charles Jones were found in a market in a trunk in 1981. The man himself had died aged 92 in 1959. He had apparently taken the photographs between 1895 and 1910 when he worked as a gardener in various private estates. How he learned to take the pictures and why he took them is a mystery, but the temperaments required to grow a Gladstone pea and develop a fine gold-toned gelatin silver print appear to have much in common.
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The pictures have been reproduced in a sumptuous book with an introduction by Robert Flynn Johnson that tells the little that is known of his story and attempts to place him in an art historical context. The photographer is seen variously, as a Victorian cast up in the 20th century, a proto-modernist, an outsider and, inevitably, as an eccentric. The interesting thing about the pictures is that they suggest all of these characteristics depending on how you understand the photographer's approach. Why is he taking pictures of vegetables?
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As a gardener his most obvious motivation for photographing vegetables must be to celebrate his own produce and more generally the bounty of Nature. This would place him in a tradition of still life painting, especially of the 17th century. Alternatively his images may be more in the spirit of 19th century botanists and taxonomists, we may think of Darwin sketching on his travels; in some pictures he has taken care to capture the apples while still on the tree, the fruit still on the vine. This scientific side to his work gives a suggestion of the modernism of Karl Blossfeldt; the stark backgrounds and the way the subjects are displayed, if not the same fascination with form. Which only leaves his eccentricity, and someone who devotes so much effort to photographing vegetables and then apparently never makes any effort to show the work to anyone is certainly eccentric.
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They are beautiful pictures and their beauty is first and foremost that of enticing food. In the preface Alice Waters enthuses that "tomatoes hang like giant, black pearls...a globular turnip rests...looking wide awake...Charles Jones reminds us that horticulture is sacred." Photographs that are good enough to eat.
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Richard West
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