James Mudd was born in Halifax in 1821. In the late 1830s, his family moved to Manchester and he began an apprenticeship as a pattern designer. In 1846 James and his brother Robert opened their own textile design business. He probably began taking photographs around this time, using the waxed paper process. In 1857 James and Robert opened a photographic studio. Mudd was probably the first Englishman to photograph industrial subjects on a regular basis. In 1856 he took on the first of several commissions to photograph locomotives and machinery made at the Beyer, Peacock and Company works in Gorton, Manchester.