This show consists of fifty-two works by WILSON A BENTLEY (1865-1931), CHARLES JONES (1866-1959) and a selection of vintage photographs by known and unknown photographers.

WILSON A. BENTLEY coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” He grew up in Jericho, Vermont, and developed a life-long fascination for snow. His parents bought him a camera with a microscope attached with which he discovered how to photograph snowflakes. The process was difficult, made more so by the temporary nature of the subject – many snowflakes melted before BENTLEY could capture their images on film, making the photographs extremely rare.

CHARLES JONES was head gardener at Ote Hall, Sussex, England, and his subjects are the fruit, vegetables and flowers he grew on that estate. The works were discovered in 1981, when a trunk of JONES’ photographs came to light at the Bermondsey Market in London. Since then JONES has been the subject of a book by Robert Flynn Johnson and Sean Sexton, Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones (Smithmark Publishers, New York, 1998), and of museum exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, in 1998, and at Le Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1999.

The vintage photographs range from the 1850s to the 1950s and include ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, gelatin silver prints with sepia toning and color coupler prints. Of the fifteen works, four were taken by known professional photographers of their time, while the remaining photographs are by unknown photographers from Britain, the United States and France. There is also a selection of cased photographs, two of which are in Union Cases.