James Fitzallen Ryder was born in April 1826 and he grew up in Tompkins County, near Ithaca, New York. He worked for three years as a printer’s apprentice, but met a “Professor” Brightly in 1847 and learned the most rudimentary introduction to daguerreotypy from him. Ryder then worked as an itinerant photographer throughout southwestern New York State, through Pennsylvania, and into Ohio, learning his trade. In the early 1850s Ryder then moved to Elyria, Ohio, and opened a studio there before moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1852, where he managed Charles E. Johnson’s studio; whom he had met passing through Ithaca years before. Ryder settled in Cleveland, Ohio; and opened his own studio by 1856. Ryder kept up-to-date by bringing innovations such as the ambrotype, stereo views, the hallotype, and hand-colored portraits to Cleveland. Ryder claimed to have introduced negative retouching to America in 1868 by importing a skilled retoucher from Germany. By the end of the decade Ryder was one of the leading photographers in Ohio, the owner of a studio employing a dozen assistants, eight camera outfits and two rolling presses; which studio produced, in 1870, up to 75,000 photographs. After a fire damaged his old studio, Ryder built an elaborate new studio in Cleveland in 1872 with an innovative large plate-glass display window and an art gallery that displayed and sold art and framing supplies, paintings and prints. This latter led him to add a sideline as a publisher of chromolithographs of genre scenes, which became very successful. The most famous of these chromolithographs was Archibald Willard’s “The Spirit of 76,” which reached an international audience and lingered on in popular iconography well into the 20th century. Ryder was extremely active during the last quarter of the 19th century promoting and establishing a sense of professionalism in the American commercial photographic community. He did this by advocating causes important to that community, (Such as the fight against Cutting’s bromide patent in the 1860s.) and assisting the formation of the first two national professional organizations, the National Photographers’ Association (He helped plan and host their second, very successful, national convention and exhibition, held in Cleveland in 1870.) and its successor, the Photographers’ Association of America, and also by participating on many of the committees, the boards, and as one of the officers of these organizations. Ryder began to lecture and he also wrote many small essays and articles of an “uplifting” nature to encourage the community to develop and maintain certain standards of professional practice. As a very successful practitioner Ryder was broadly considered to be one of the top twenty photographic leaders of the period, and after the N. P. A. disbanded in factionalism and discord, Ryder had the credibility to be elected the first President of the Photographers Association of America in 1880. He held this position several times and tried to use it to advance good works, as when he persuaded the photographic community to erect a statue of Daguerre in Washington, DC or when he attempted to create a relief fund for the old photographer Jex Bardwell. In 1892 Ryder took the somewhat uncommon step of incorporating his gallery into a company, thus allowing his employees to have a greater share of the responsibilities and in the profits; then Ryder retired in 1894, successful and wealthy. He continued to be active in the photographic community, participating in the Photographers’ Association of America meetings each year until 1903, the year before he died. After retirement he began writing an autobiography, mostly consisting of anecdotes from his early years, and filled with his very real appreciation of the great growth that his country and his profession had undergone during his forty-plus years of activity. Ryder shared excerpts from these writings at P. A. A. meetings or in the journals and, incidentally, thus established himself as one of the “grand old men” of the profession. The completed autobiography was published in 1902, again, to much acclaim. He died in Cleveland on June 2, 1904.
