From its beginnings in York, Pennsylvania, in 1847, until the death
of Wallace L. Goodridge in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1922, the
Goodridge Brothers Studio was the most significant and enduring
African American photographic establishment in North America. The
studio was made possible by the financial success of the family
patriarch, William C. Goodridge, a York barber mined entrepreneur.
With the financial assistance of his father, young Glenalvin
Goodridge founded the studio in York in 1847. Glenalvin worked as a
successful daguerreotypist and ambrotypist, until the community's
perception of his own financial success and the family's
involvement in abolitionist activities resulted in his trial and
imprisonment. As a result of his imprisonment Glenalvin contracted
tuberculosis, which led to his untimely death.
With the outbreak of the Civil War and the circumstances
surrounding the trial, the family left York for new homes in
Minnesota and in East Saginaw, Michigan, where Glenalvin's younger
brothers, Wallace and William O. Goodridge, reopened the studio in
1863. During the next three decades the brothers worked as a team,
with William providing the artistic inspiration and Wallace the
financial direction. The brothers continued the family tradition of
excellence and innovation by concentrating on the latest
photographic images, including flash, panoramic, and motion
pictures.
In Enterprising Images, John Vincent Jezierski tells the story
of one of America's first families of photography, documenting the
history of the Goodridge studio for three-quarters of a century.
The existence of more than one thousand Goodridge photographs in
all formats (daguerreotypes to motion pictures) andthe family's
professional and personal activism enrich the portrait that emerges
of this extraordinary family. Weaving photographic and regional
history with the narrative of a family whose lives paralleled the
social and political happenings of the country, Jezierski provides
the reader with a complex family biography for those interested in
regional and African American, as well as photographic,
history.
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