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| Enterprising Images: the Goodridge Brothers, African American Photographers, 1847-1922
     
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Hardcover
346 pages
Wayne State University Press
Published 2000
From Booklist
The firm Jezierski recounts here intersects American history enough to exert interest beyond its locality of Saginaw, Michigan. Jezierski noted the ubiquity of the Goodridge brothers' studio while assembling photography exhibits about Michigan's logging frenzy in the 1870s. Tracing the firm's lineage, he found the founder was a William Goodridge, born a slave in 1806 in Baltimore, who was apprenticed out to a barber in York, Pennsylvania. William next appears in York's records around 1830, a free man who conducted several businesses, later among them a daguerrotype studio and a freight railroad. Goodridge experienced the sectional crisis as an abolitionist who possibly assisted the Underground Railroad, but it was a different crisis that exiled the Goodridges from York: the conviction of his eldest on a charge of raping a white woman. Paroled, that son and two brothers started over in Saginaw, achieving success and civic leadership (the Goodridges once hosted a Frederick Douglass speech). The author's academic manner may not mean excitement, but the profusely illustrated story he's researched holds intrinsic interest. Gilbert Taylor |
Enterprising Images: the Goodridge Brothers, African American Photographers, 1847-1922
John Vincent Jezierski (Author) |  |
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