Jeffrey L. Horrell

Seneca Ray Stoddard’s photographic and literary work paralleled the era of exploration of this region as well as the early years of photography. It was during his lifetime—as a result of the changing perceptions of the wilderness—that the area first attracted artists, tourists, and summer residents.Jeffrey L. Horrell’s book explores the nature of this Adirondack pioneer’s work and examines how it influenced and was influenced by the changing attitudes toward wilderness in the last half of the nineteenth century. It is the first complete volume to provide an in-depth study of both Stoddard’s writing and photography. Through his photographs and publishing ventures, Stoddard moved from recording the wilderness landscape to defending it against the logging industry and other developers.Stoddard was instrumental in creating the modern perception of the ""forever wild"" landscape of the Adirondacks. Although there had been a well-established tradition of guidebooks for American tourist regions, Stoddard’s practice of including illustrations based on photographs represented a new departure. Horrell shows how Stoddard’s work reflected matters of class and power on the emerging tourist industry and its effect on the popular literature of the day.

The coal mining photographs of C. William Horrell, taken across the southern Illinois Coal Belt over a twenty-year period from 1966 to 1986, are extraordinary examples of documentary photography—so stark and striking that captions seem superfluous.Horrell’s photographs, reproduced in fine duotone lithography, capture the varied phenomena of twentieth-century coal mining technology: the awesome scale of surface mining machines and their impact on the land; massive machines forced into narrow passageways with inches to spare as they carry coal from the face to conveyer belts; and, more significantly, the advent of continuous miners, machines that dominated underground or ""deep"" mines during the mid-1960s.Horrell was also intrigued by the related activities of mining, including coal’s processing, cleaning, and transportation, as well as the daily, behind-the-scenes operations that keep mines and miners working. His photographs reflect the beauty of the commonplace—the clothes of the miners, their dinner pails, and their tools—and reveal the picturesque remnants of closed mines: the weathered boards of company houses, the imposing iron beauty of an ancient tipple, the grassy sidewalks of an old coal town, and an abandoned building against the lowering sky of an approaching storm. Finally, his portraits of coal miners, such as the widely published Black-Faced Miner, show the strength, dignity, and enduring spirit of the men and women who work the southern Illinois coal mines.

An exploration of the Adirondack photographic and literary work of Seneca Ray Stoddard. It examines how it influenced and was influenced by changing attitudes toward wilderness in the last half of the 19th century and how it reflected class and power in the emerging tourist industry.