Joseph Brown: Milwaukee Photograph Archive

Joseph Brown... Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company. From Joseph Brown: Milwaukee Photograph Archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society. "...Joseph Brown (1851-1928) was a commercial photographer in Milwaukee whose work had all but vanished from sight until the Wisconsin Historical Society acquired and digitized it earlier this year. For several decades Brown and his sons took hundreds of pictures of Milwaukee streets, apartment buildings, docks, shipping, parks, railroad yards, factories, and other urban sites for reasons that are not clear. The images may have been contract work for property owners, insurers or other parties who wanted a documentary record. Despite his decades of work and volume of output, Brown's work generally escaped the notice of curators at Wisconsin's cultural institutions. After his death in 1928 and the dissolution of the firm after World War II, his archive of 8-by-10-inch glass-plate negatives fell into private hands."