Howard Greenberg Gallery presents A response to wonder: Charles Jones, Karl Blossfeldt, and Edward Weston from December 5, 2024 through January 18, 2025. The exhibition highlights the work of three influential photographers who each captured nature in distinctive ways. Charles Jones is known for his detailed botanical studies, while Karl Blossfeldt focused on close-up images of plants, revealing their complex structures. Edward Weston is recognized for his modernist interpretations of nudes, still life and landscape. Jones’ proto-modernist vision anticipates the work of Blossfeldt and Weston through its singular focus on natural forms. The exhibition brings together three distinct approaches to nature and its magnificence, showcasing how each artist's perspective offers a deeper understanding of the natural world.

Charles Jones (1866-1959), one of the photography world’s mysterious discoveries, was unknown as an artist until his work was found by a collector in a London street market in 1981. Born in England, he was a trained gardener and achieved public recognition for his horticultural skills. Between 1895 and 1910 Jones experimented with photography and produced a series of stunning gold-toned gelatin silver prints of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. He photographed his subjects isolated from nature, against neutral or dark backdrops. His technique was unprecedented for the time and foreshadowed the photographs of Edward Weston, Karl Blossfeldt and other Modernist images from the 1920s and 1930s. Not recognized as a photographer in his lifetime, it is likely that Jones photographed for his own private exploration and did not share his interest with family or friends. Charles Jones left behind no negatives, journals, or papers and died a near recluse in 1959. A monograph of his work, Plant kingdoms: the photographs of Charles Jones with a forward by Alice Waters, was published in 1998.

Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932), a German sculptor and photographer, is best known for his magnified close-up photographs of plants, published in his influential 1928 monograph Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature). Studying under Moritz Meurer from 1890-1896, Blossfeldt traveled Europe and North Africa, photographing botanical specimens. He began teaching in 1898, using his own photographs as teaching tools while maintaining a detailed log of their names. By the 1920s, his photos gained recognition for their artistic value, distinguished by their precision and clear focus, contrasting with the blurred images popular at the time. Blossfeldt’s work emphasized the geometric structures in nature, inspired by his early training as a sculptor and iron craftsman. His photographs, primarily intended as reference images, utilized simple backgrounds to highlight the plant forms’ symmetry and patterns. Blossfeldt’s homemade lenses magnified his subjects by thirty times, allowing him to capture intricate details that reflected nature's repeating textures. His work influenced many photographers, and his legacy as a pioneer of close-up photography endures, contributing to a profound shift in how we perceive the world.

Edward Weston (1886-1959), born in Highland Park, Illinois, began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902. His works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. The Western landscape soon became his principal subject matter. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography. In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous – sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables like cabbages, kale, and peppers, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces -- are among the finest of 20th-century photographs; their influence on modern art remains inestimable.