Lower Ausable Lake-Indian Head 1891

Seneca Ray Stoddard made this photograph, "Lower Ausable Lake-Indian Head", as an illustration within a larger report on the forests of New York. These images were often circulated alongside texts that promoted tourism and resource management. Here, we can see the way Stoddard frames a seemingly untouched wilderness, yet this view elides a complex history of Indigenous presence and the exploitation of natural resources. The figure in the boat subtly evokes the romantic figure of the ‘noble savage’, a trope that obscures the realities of colonial violence and displacement. The “Indian Head” refers to a rock formation resembling a human profile, turning the landscape into a monument, a memorial, and a memento mori. Stoddard’s photographs, like so many landscape images of the period, are not neutral documents; they participate in the construction of an American identity rooted in the myth of an uninhabited and available land. How might we re-imagine this landscape by foregrounding the stories and experiences of those who were systematically erased from these images?