Plant Kingdoms

At a London antiques market in 1981, Sean Sexton, a photograph collector, discovered some prints of startling originality. Hidden for nearly eighty years, the work of Charles Jones, an "outsider" genius, was saved final obscurity only by this chance encounter.Now the photographs are available to the world for the first time in Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones. Jones, a mysterious turn-of-the-century figure who worked as a gardener, obsessively photographed the plants he came across everyday but showed them to few people. The photographs are Jones's only statement. He left no notes, diaries, or writings to explain his reason for the creation of such a prodigious and concentrated body of work, superbly reproduced in this book.His techniques -- close-up viewpoint long exposure and spare composition -- anticipate by decades the later achievement of modernist masters. These portraits of all types of flowers, fruits, and vegetables bring the reader into a strange and beautiful encounter with the natural world.Revealing art in nature, Jones's images have a wider significance in the history of both photography and still-life, brilliantly explored and explained in this book by the renowned art expert Robert Flynn Johnson.