The Batchelder studio: gold rush society photographers

Before he took his landmark sequence of photographs of the racehorse Sallie Gardner in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge earned his reputation travelling through the Californian mining towns with his flying studio, a muledrawn wagon that functioned as both photographic studio and darkroom. He boasted that he could work to order and produce prints faster than others who had to return to San Francisco to create their images.

But Muybridge wasn’t the first to use a portable studio on the goldfields. Years before he took up photography, the Batchelder brothers were operating one. They sold it to William Rulofson, who later went into partnership with Muybridge. The reason the brothers sold their studio was that in 1854, the