Questioning the true age of photography, the exhibition will open with some of the first known Victorian images by William Henry Fox Talbot, positioning his experimentation with paper negatives as the very beginning of photography. It will also introduce a key selection of cyanotypes by one of the first women photographers, Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who created camera-less photograms of the algae specimens found along the south coast of England. Displayed publicly for the first time, these works highlight the ground-breaking accuracy of Atkins’ approach, and the remarkably contemporary appearance of her work which has inspired many artists and designers.

The exhibition will also foreground the artists who produced unprecedented photographic art in the twentieth century without artistic intention. The medium allowed for quick documentation of nature’s infinite specimens, making it an important tool for scientists and  botanists such as the German photographer and teacher Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) who captured close-up views of plant specimens in order to study and share an understanding of nature’s ‘architecture’. A selection of Blossfeldt’s ‘study aids’ will be displayed alongside work by the proud gardener Charles Jones, who used a glass plate camera to keep a meticulously illustrated record of his finest crops. Seen together for the first time, the two artists will be examined for their pragmatic approach that set them apart from the romanticised style of their time.

Nobuyoshi Araki - Anna Atkins - Alois Auer - Sir Cecil Beaton - Karl Blossfeldt - Adolphe Braun - Jan Brueghel I - Mat Collishaw - Imogen Cunningham - Roger Fenton - Adam Fuss - Ori Gersht - Cecilia Glaisher - Joy Gregory - William Henry Fox-Talbot - John Frederick Herschel - Gyula Holics - Jan van Huysum - Henry Irving - Charles Jones - Sarah Jones - André Kertész - Nick Knight - Lou Landauer - Richard Learoyd - Pradip Malde - Robert Mapplethorpe - John Moffat - Sarah Moon - James Mudd - Kazumasa Ogawa - [Enami Nobukuni] T. Enami - Albert G. Richards - Charles T. Scowen - [Maurice Scheltens & Liesbeth Abbenes] Scheltens & Abbenes - Helen Sear - Edward Steichen - Josef Sudek - Lorenzo Vitturi - Edward Weston - Walter Bentley Woodbury -
Curator Alexander Moore -

Maureen Paley is pleased to present Sarah Jones’ sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. Following on from the recent publication of her monograph by Violette Editions, Jones’ new photographs continue to explore how subjects are measured and transcribed through the large format view camera and flattened in pictorial space. Predicated on the disarming and the vernacular she uses a vocabulary that simultaneously describes as well as documents. In her expanded Cabinet series arrangements of found objects are contained, mirrored and presented as if held in a vitrine.

Over the years themes such as the analyst’s couch, the municipal rose garden as still life in-situ, the drawing studio and the singular female subject have been central to her concerns. Her photographs are often made on location and illuminated with carefully controlled lighting that allows the subject to both emerge from and recede into a darkened space. Through the use of analogue techniques Jones studies the correspondence between the skein of the film, the surface of the photographic print and the surface of her subjects. For Jones this attention to materiality brings to mind the act of mark making in drawing.

She has previously used the diptych as a formal device and direct reference to early stereographic photographs in order to present two perspectives of a single form. More recent diptychs consider the act of doubling and the alchemic nature of the photographic process by literally flipping an Image.

Sarah Jones -