French, 19th century, male.
Born, 13 June 1812, near Besançon, France; died 31 December 1877, in Dornach, France.
Photographer, textile designer, entrepreneur.
Botanicals, landscapes, nature, architecture, figures, animals.
Adolphe Braun had a successful career creating designs for printed fabrics and wallpapers. In the early 1840s, he was admitted to the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, and designs by his firm were gaining international recognition. To provide his designers with models for study, Braun photographed botanical arrangements using the wet collodion process, which was perfected in the early 1850s. His albumen silver prints of flowers, grasses and botanical materials are richly toned and expressive, in contrast to standard scientific botanical studies. Although Braun initially approached photography as a technical means to further the art of textile design, he quickly realized the artistic merit of his photographs and distributed them to a wider public in catalogues....
