John Coates Browne est né en 1838 et mort en 1919. John Coates Browne Photographe, vivait et travaillais à Philadelphia aux états unis.
Membre fondateur de la Société Photographique de Philadelphie où il exposa régulièrement ses œuvres, John C. Browne (1838-1918) fut vraisemblablement l'un de ces amateurs, au sens noble du terme, c'est-à-dire un expert en photographie, excellent technicien dont la pratique s'exerçait souvent à l'intérieur du cercle familial.
John Coates Browne was born in Philadelphia to a wealthy family. His occupation is listed in 1860s Philadelphia directories as "gentleman." He was an amateur photographer, but an ardent booster of the profession and one of the founding members of the Philadelphia Photographic Society. In the summer of 1869 Browne went to Ottumwa, Iowa, with a United States Government expedition to photograph the total eclipse of the sun. In 1891 Browne traveled to Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Alaska, returning with 200 negatives, from which he made lantern slides. His legacy is an impressive collection of photographs of vanishing Philadelphia scenes.
A Children’s Play (Bluebeard’s Wives), ca. 1866, printed ca. 1975, modern gelatin silver print from the original collodion negative, George Eastman House
This rather haunting image is a modern day gelatin silver print made from the original collodion glass plate negative, and was created by John Coates Browne around 1866. Browne was an amateur photographer who maintained a prominent role in the Photographic Society of Philadelphia.
The morbidity of the image may come as a shock—five of the six young girls are play-acting dead. Hung by their hair, their faces are painted white, matching their ghostly gowns. The play is based off of a French fairytale, about a nobleman who has a penchant for killing successive young wives. An outcast, he is feared for his ugly blue beard. He has been married several times, and each of his young wives mysteriously disappears, frightening the village girls. The story takes place when his most recent wife, still alive, discovers his secret cellar where he keeps the bodies of his murdered former wives, and recounts her attempts to escape.
Browne stages this as a genre scene, not unlike those created by Oscar Gustave Rejlander or Henry Peach Robinson, masters of allegorical or staged photographs. However, unlike Rejlander or Robinson’s images, this one was not made using multiple negatives, rather the entire scene was captured in one shot.
