Fritillaria

Textile design and art reproduction were established and thriving commercial enterprises at the time that Adolphe Braun took up the camera. His ingenuity and skillfulness in applying photography to these industries made him one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century. At a time when longevity in the photographic field was rare, Braun’s career endured until the end of his life, and the studio he founded, in 1868, existed well into the twentieth century. In addition to his business savvy, Braun’s success lay in his supreme technical abilities. Using vast glass negatives, he created photographs of remarkable scale and clarity.

His floral still lifes, like this one, remain the works for which he is best known. He began creating them in 1853 while working as a textile and wallpaper designer. His intention had been to provide models for his designs, but the French photographic establishment almost immediately understood them as works of art in and of themselves. By 1855, Braun had left the design world to dedicate himself entirely to photography.