The idea that these photographs are a remarkable presentiment of modernism was certainly one reason that made the images marketable, in the ‘90s and now.

Some have compared them to the studies made by the American photographer Imogen Cunningham, who famously produced artful studies of the magnolia flower in the mid-1920s, set against stark, neutral backgrounds.

The German photographer Karl Blossfeldt, who also worked at this time, had developed his own macro camera systems in order to take similar photographs of plants and flowers close-up, revelling in their unfamiliar forms and contours (the philosopher Walter Benjamin was a fan).

But to present Jones’s photographs simply as a prelude to the main show of modernism would be somewhat limited, and in many ways his work is very different to what came later. With Cunningham and Blossfeldt the plants aren’t conveyed as individuals but as specimens, examples of form: clean-lined and curvy, often cropped into abstraction.

Charles Jones, however, seems to have been aiming for something weirder and, to my mind, a little more interesting: looking at many of his images you have the unavoidable impression that they are portraits of vegetables. You see the flecks of dirt hanging off them, the rumpled edges of the photographic backdrop, the scuff marks on the floor as he has moved and repositioned them. There’s poignancy in such details, as well as a gentle absurdity.

My favourites of his images in this regard are the root vegetables, specifically the stout ‘mangolds’ (similar to a beetroot). ‘Long Reds’, ‘Yellow Globes’ and ‘Red Tankards’ with their scuffed surfaces, look like satellite images of an alien planet, while at the same time they exude a strangely human presence, an unflappable dignity.

In many of his images, such as Bean Longpod, there’s a photographer’s delight in form, a gardener’s pride in what he has produced, but also a kind of respect for the vegetable’s own existence – as separate, whole, mysterious.