For 40 years, Seneca Ray Stoddard produced guidebooks,
maps, drawings, paintings, and photographs detailing the life and landscape of
the Adirondack Mountain region in upstate New York. Stoddard’s photographs,
shown to the legislature in 1892, helped win approval of a clause in the New
York State constitution that forest preserves such as Adirondack Park should
remain “forever wild.”

Although his thousands of photographs provided an accurate
evocation of the Adirondack life, the limitations of the young medium of photography
would have meant that scenes such as this one, which seems like a spontaneous
snapshot, would in fact have been carefully staged.