Charles Harry Jones (1866 – 15 November 1959) was an English

gardener A gardener is someone who practices gardening, either professionally or as a hobby. Description A gardener is any person involved in gardening, arguably the oldest occupation, from the hobbyist in a residential garden, the home-owner suppleme ...

and

photographer A photographer (the Greek language, Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types of photographe ...

, noted for his

still life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, m ...

s of fruit and vegetables.

Biography

Born in

Wolverhampton Wolverhampton () is a city, metropolitan borough and administrative centre in the West Midlands, England. The population size has increased by 5.7%, from around 249,500 in 2011 to 263,700 in 2021. People from the city are called "Wulfrunian ...

in 1866, although his father was a master butcher, Charles Harry Jones became a gardener. He worked on a number of private estates in England from the 1890s, including Great Ote Hall, near Burgess Hill, Sussex. His gardening was noted for the quality of his flowerbeds and cultivation of fruits and vegetables. He was also ingenious in providing a long season for fruit and vegetables. As a photographer, Jones was noted for his documentation of the fruits of his gardening labours. Jones also offered his services as a photographer to other gardeners. He married in 1894. By 1910 he and his family moved to Lincolnshire, where he died on 15 November 1959, aged ninety-two.

Photographic work

The photographs were probably made between 1895 and 1910, and likely while he was employed at Ote Hall. Jones' work was never exhibited in his lifetime, and was largely unknown even to his family, until the photographic prints were discovered by accident in 1981. Sean Sexton found a suitcase containing hundreds of prints of vegetables, fruits and flowers at

Bermondsey Bermondsey () is a district in southeast London, part of the London Borough of Southwark, England, southeast of Charing Cross. To the west of Bermondsey lies Southwark, to the east Rotherhithe and Deptford, to the south Walworth and Peckham, a ...

antiques market. Other than a very few exceptions, Jones' photographs exist only in unique examples. None of the glass-plate negatives have been located. Jones isolated his vegetables, fruits and flowers against neutral dark or light backgrounds, in the manner of formal studio portraits. He used long exposures and small

apertures In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture and focal length of an optical system determine the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane. An opt ...

to give

depth of field The depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image captured with a camera. Factors affecting depth of field For cameras that can only focus on one object dist ...

Legacy

Since Sexton's discovery, the collection of Jones' photographs has slowly been dispersed by him through auction and by other means. It has been collected by institutions and private collectors and exhibited at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Musée de Elysée, Lausanne and at other venues and also been the subject of a book. In 2021 several of Jones' photographs were included in an exhibition at the

Dulwich Picture Gallery Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London, which opened to the public in 1817. It was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane using an innovative and influential method of illumination. Dulwich is the oldest publi ...

about the history of photography through images of plants and botany, since they illustrate the use of gelatin silver printing.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jones, Charles Photographers from Staffordshire English gardeners 1866 births 1959 deaths People from Wolverhampton