bremser:Charles Jones, Leek Prize taker(two different versions), ca. 1900 (source left, source righ
bremser:Charles Jones, Leek Prize taker (two different versions), ca. 1900 (source left, source right) & turnip green globe.Not sure if these are the same leeks in separate compositions, or different winners of the same year. But who was Charles Jones? He was a gardner of private English estates around the turn of the century. Jones was obsessed with photographing what he grew. Think of him as Vivian Maier of garden photography. His work was re-discovered in the 1990s, similar to Maier, found in a trunk in Bermondsey market, a London antique market. Edward Weston comes to mind when seeing a selection of Jones’ vegetable photos, except Jones was growing his and making photos a few decades before Weston. Jones was shooting on glass plate negatives, which were slower speed than film. Weston made incredibly long exposures (hours!) of his peppers and leeks, shooting at f64 in dark rooms. Karl Blossfeldt is another comparison - they were the same age, yet Blossfeldt’s work is scientific, analytic, architectural. Jones wanted to document what these things looked like when they came out of the soil, Blossfeldt wanted to determine how they were structured; what their genes were trying to achieve.From Wikipedia: He died in Lincolnshire on 15 November 1959, aged ninety-two. Thames and Hudson published a book in 1998, with a preface by Alice Waters (example spreads). Here’s even more background on his photography. -- source link
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