Seneca Ray Stoddard Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1844 - d. 1917

Seneca Ray Stoddard (1843/4-1917) was a late nineteenth century landscape photographer. Stoddard grew up in Wilton, New York and spent most of his later years in Glens Falls. With a love for poetry, traveling and painting, Stoddard explored his surroundings with open eyes and a curious mind. Stoddard began photographing in his twenties, carrying the knowledge he acquired as a painter into his pictorial photographs. Seneca Ray Stoddard’s images evoke the same serenity and contemplativeness that was attributed to many landscape paintings of the time. Stoddard’s long exposures captured ethereal waterfalls, and the grandiosity of nature made his viewers, and subjects, seem small. Known primarily for his work of the Adirondacks, Stoddard documented the vast, uninhabited environment outside of the studio and far away from the industrialized cities of his post-civil war country. Stoddard’s work served as both a document and an art, simple yet sublime, promoting American tourism and supporting the conservation of the Adirondacks.