"James Hill worked as an amateur photographer in Bristol, UK from the late 19th century into the 1920s."
What we know about James Hill is summarized in the sentence above and it seems a rather meager way to describe a life but the photographs belie the simplicity of the statement.
Throughout photography there are great photographs by anonymous creators and series of work where few details are known - the vegetable photographs of Charles Jones are a classic example of this. In this series we have photographs taken in around 1910 but they come out of a tradition that has clear antecedents in the photographs by Adolphe Braun in the 1850s or Charles Hippolyte Aubry in the 1860s and the continuum goes on to the work of Tom Baril in his flowers in the 1990s. James Hill may remain an obscure "amateur", the worst sin of all photographers, but he is just as much a part of the tradition of flower photography as many a better known name.
