One pioneer, in particular of photography’s uses in persuasion, was Seneca Ray Stoddard of Glens Falls. His principal subject, among several: the Adirondacks.

As a fine and comprehensive new book by Stoddard’s descendant Daniel Way makes clear, Stoddard (1844-1917) was much more than just a picture-taker. Using the formula “Stoddard the …” for his chapter titles, Way lets us know his ancestor was an innovative night photographer, cartographer, inventor, sailor, lecturer, humorist, poet, publisher and businessman. Way, a retired primary care physician with the Hudson Headwaters Health Network, adds on the back cover that Stoddard was also an artist, author, explorer, surveyor and “environmentalist before the word was even recognized.”

One wonders what he did to relax.

“Seneca Ray Stoddard: An Intimate Portrait of an Adirondack Legend” (Warren County Historical Society, 2022) joins other works about Stoddard, including two by the late Maitland DeSormo of Malone and Saranac Lake, who Way credits for seeing that Stoddard was “resurrected from obscurity.” But Way goes further by delving into the man’s personal life, motivations, and so on. Further, he writes in his introduction, “I want the reader to come away with an appreciation of the tremendous environmental impact his efforts have had on preserving the Adirondacks.” (Both here and on the back cover, the author calls his book “An Intimate Look at” instead of “…Portrait of,” but I would search under the latter.)

A photo of Henderson Lake taken from the same vantage point as a Seneca Ray Stoddard photograph, shot by Stoddard biographer Daniel Way. (Photo provided)

There is not room here to delve deeply into all aspects of Stoddard, of this book. Suffice it to say each, despite the minor flaw cited above, is outstanding for its own reasons.

Let’s skim a random couple of aspects Stoddard’s expansive creativity, his boundless energy. His poems, while formulaic in the days before free verse broke the rules — led in part by another Adirondacker, Jeanne Robert Foster — are amusing and effective. He produced some of the first true guidebooks to the Adirondacks, indicating travel routes, where to stay and so on, and in them employed sometimes barbed humor, as when he savaged W.H.H. Murray, an early gusher over the Adirondacks, for employing “the precious incense of conceptive genius” — this is, for fibbing.

Stoddard was best known for his powerful photography. His pictures of the devastation of the woods by rapacious lumbering did much to persuade the public, and legislators, toward creation of the Adirondack Forest Preserve in 1885 and encompassing State Park in 1892.

Way is himself an accomplished photographer. One appeal of this book is his duplicating of Stoddard’s scenes (see the “then and now” views of Henderson Lake at right). They show that some things haven’t changed in the Adirondacks in 150 years.

This is Way’s fourth book. The other three are highly moving portraits in words and pictures of Adirondack folk he met in his medical practice, to whom he imparts dignity and grace. All can be obtained via Amazon or eBay, at www.danielway.com, or at the Adirondack Experience gift shop and other retailers.