Beginning more than a century ago, a photographer named Seneca Ray Stoddard explored and documented the Adirondacks in a series of brilliant black-and-white images. This book presents the first major collection of that work.

Stoddard, who grew up on the outskirts of the region, came to know its varied glories by hiking, camping, and canoeing its length and breadth.

He pictured not just the softly rounded peaks of the area, the mirrored lakes, and pine-decked groves, but the burgeoning and popular hotels, the local guides with their indigenous craft (the elegant Adirondack guide boats), the loggers, hunters, and legions of rusticators who rushed up each summer from New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere to experience a wild and beautiful America that was already disappearing.

John Wilmerding sets the scene by placing Stoddard's work in the artistic context of its time. In her important survey of Stoddard's achievement, Jeanne Winston Adler traces the artist's life and times, from a boyhood near Albany and Troy, through an apprenticeship as a decorative painter of railway carriages, to his growing mastery of photographic technique.