Cow tied to a post lying in grass,

ca. 1855

Compared to Adrien Tournachon’s prize horse in the case above, Braun’s cow strikes a much more casual pose. Seated with its head turned away from us, it gazes off into a pastoral landscape blurred by the camera’s shallow depth of field. The disparity in staging speaks to the two works’ differing aims. While Tournachon sought to document the physical appearance of a specific horse, Braun was more concerned with creating a picturesque scene. Braun began his career making floral still-life photographs as models for the textile industry, before founding his own commercial studio and expanding his repertoire to include portraits, rustic and alpine landscapes, street scenes, stereographs and panoramas, and reproductions of works of art. Braun’s company also experimented with different photographic and printing processes to lower the cost and increase the production limits of photography, in an attempt to make his pictures available to the widest possible public.