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.