C.S. Fly's Photography Studio

This building is a replica of Camillus S. Fly’s photography studio.

Camillus Sidney Fly was born in Missouri in 1849. His family moved to California that same year and later settled in Napa County. He became a photographer and opened a studio in San Francisco. That business did not thrive. Tombstone’s silver boom was the chance to start again. He married Mary E. Goodrich, known as Mollie, in September 1879. In December 1879 they established Fly’s Photography Gallery in Tombstone. The studio stood with their boarding house at 312 Fremont Street, beside the vacant lot where the gunfight took place on October 26, 1881.

From that gallery Fly photographed the people of Tombstone, public gatherings, miners at work, the streets, and the country around the town. Mollie did most of the day-to-day portrait work, and she ran the gallery when Camillus was away. She was one of the few women photographers working in the Arizona Territory. One of her cameras is on display in this replica, with other photographic equipment from the 1880s and photographs from the Fly gallery.

A portrait in the 1880s was not a snapshot. The photographer worked with a large camera and glass plates, and the person being photographed had to hold still. Prints were then made from those negatives. That is how people in Tombstone, including the Earps and the Clantons, were pictured. The original buildings put the boarding house toward Fremont Street and the gallery behind it, the two joined by a passage. The building you are in is a replica of the studio, not the 1880 structure. Fly was not one of the men in the gunfight. The shots were fired in the vacant lot outside. The studio is here so you can see the equipment used for the portraits.

The photographs Fly is famous for were not all made in this room. In March 1886 he took his camera to Cañon de los Embudos in Mexico, where General George Crook was negotiating with the Apache leader Geronimo. The pictures he made there are the only known photographs of American Indians taken while they were still at war with the United States. Those prints, his photographs of Tombstone, and his photographs of the 1887 earthquake at Bavispe, in Sonora, are shown in C.S. Fly’s Boarding House. The studio and the boarding house were one business. The gallery earned its keep from portraits and town views. The boarding house kept the household going when Camillus traveled. The cameras are in this room. The pictures, and the room where Doc Holliday was staying, are in the boarding house.

This stop is marked on the O.K. Corral Guide Map. The other stops are listed on the Exhibits page.