Onion (Rousham Park Hero)

Recently, Facebook’s algorithm flagged a photograph of onions for apparent indecency. Warmly lit and elegantly posed, these onions might likewise pass for food porn. Anticipating today’s farm-to-table fetish by a century, Sussex gardener Jones photographed a harvest from his employer’s estate. Isolated against a stark backdrop, the onions presage the formalist still lifes of photographers like Edward Weston, though Jones resists the modernist impulse to abstract his subjects from the quotidian contexts of kitchen and garden. In his album from the period, some pictures of produce appear alongside family snapshots, while others are pasted in taxonomic grids and labeled by type. Equal parts scrapbook and scientific ledger, the album suggests the dual roles of the camera for Jones; in his lens, creative and empirical impulses converge.