EVENTS
Rodeo Photographer
Born in 1881 at Canton, Ohio, Ralph Doubleday immortalized hundreds of rodeo cowboys, and his photographs helped popularize the sport.
In 1910, at the Cheyenne Frontier Days, Ralph Doubleday snapped the first known images of a professional rodeo. His first photo captured Gus Nylen on a bronc named Teddy (after Theodore Roosevelt). Using a bulky Graflex camera, Doubleday stood in the arena and “rode the horse with the cowboy. Just when I felt I was going to buck off, I snapped the shutter.” During his career, Doubleday had studios in Iowa, Wyoming, and North Dakota.
Over four decades, Ralph Doubleday sold an estimated 30 million postcards of rodeo action. In the 1970s the National Cowboy Hall of Fame received an important collection of Doubleday’s photographic negatives. They trace the history of the sport from the 1910s through the mid-1940s. Doubleday died in 1958.
