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survey of the territories west of the 100th meridian as
a replacement for Timothy O’Sullivan, who had joined
a U.S. Navy expedition exploring the Darien Peninsula
in Panama. During his single season with the Wheeler
Survey, Bell photographed along the Colorado River
and the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon in south-
western Utah and northwestern Arizona—well to the
west and north of where William Abraham Bell took
photographs in 1867. Bell used both the wet and dry
collodion processes in the fi eld, and employed two
cameras, an 8 × 11 for large views and a 5 × 8 for ste-
reos. In composing his images Bell utilized a distinc-
tive compositional formula that emphasized both the
overwhelming scale and the vast spaces of the landscape
he encountered. While he made horizontal views (in-
cluding several multi-plate panoramas), Bell’s charac-
teristic Western images are vertical compositions with
a strong, dark visual element that parallels the picture
plane and dominates the foreground, while the middle
ground recedes into the distance in a series of increas-
ingly lighter toned parallel planes. This compositional
formula typifi es stereoscopic photography, and it yields
dramatic and evocative results in Bell’s images, while
it serves to distinguish them from the work his con-
temporaries. After the Wheeler Survey, Bell returned
to Philadelphia, and in 1875 went into partnership with
William Rau, his future son-in-law, who was a noted
professional photographer in his own right. Except for
his brief stints with the Transit of Venus Expedition in
1882, the Kentucky State Geological Survey in 1884,
and a commission from the organizers of the Columbia
World’s Fair in 1892 to travel around Europe to photo-
graph the paintings being borrowed for exhibition at the
Fair in 1893, Bell spent the remainder of his career in
Philadelphia, where he was active in the photographic
societies and contributed technical articles on the dry
plate processes (on which he was considered an expert),
as well as memoirs of his experiences to, professional
publications, notably Philadelphia Photographer and
Photographic Mosiacs.
William Bell has been overshadowed by his contem-
poraries, overlooked in most of the infl uential histories
of photography, and confused with William Abraham
Bell by many historians. His photographs were included
in the albums published by the Wheeler Survey, and
they were exhibited in the Vienna Universal Exposition
(1873), the Louisville Industrial Exposition in Kentucky
(1873), and at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia
(1876), but they received little attention. After his death
his obituaries noted his military service, his work with
the Army Medical Museum and the Wheeler Survey,
and his expertise in the dry-plate processes, but only
within the past three decades has William Bell begun to
receive the recognition due him.
Will Stapp
See Also: Bell, William Abraham; and O’Sullivan,
Timothy.Further Reading
Johnson, William S. Nineteenth-Century Photography: An An-
notated Bibliography, 1839–1879. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.,
1990.
Naef, Weston. Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Pho-
tography in the American West, 1860-1885. Buffalo, N.Y.:
Albright-Knox Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
the New York Graphic Society, 1975.
Pitts, Terence R. William Bell: Philadelphia Photographer.
Tucson, AZ, Department of Art, 1987. (Master of Arts Thesis,
University of Arizona, 1987).
Snyder, Joel. One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs
by Bell and O’Sullivan. Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart
Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2006.
Obituaries: Washington, D.C. Sunday Star, January 30, 1910;
Philadelphia Inquirer, January 30, 1910.BELL, WILLIAM ABRAHAM (1841–1921)
Dr. William Abraham Bell, an English physician who
came to the United States in 1867, is signifi cant because
of his brief but unsuccessful career as one of the fi rst sur-
vey photographers of the American West and because he
been confl ated with two other William Bells who were
his contemporaries: William Bell from Philadelphia
(c. 1830–1910), who had a long, varied, and important
career as a photographer, and William C. Bell, a minor
Washington, DC (later Baltimore, MD) studio photogra-
pher (active c. 1860–c. 1880). Dr. William Abraham Bell
was active less than six months and was not prolifi c. His
work is extremely rare and seldom seen or reproduced,
with the exception of one image. His photograph of the
mutilated corpse of Sergeant Wyllyams, a cavalryman
killed by Cheyenne Indians near Ft. Wallace, Kansas, is
one of the most vivid documents of the horrifi c nature
of the Indian Wars.
William Abraham Bell was the son of a London
physician. He was born in Ireland, earned his medical
degree from Cambridge University, and practiced at
St. George’s Hospital in London before leaving for the
United States in 1867 to study homeopathic medicine
in St. Louis, Missouri. Upon arriving in Philadelphia,
however, Bell decided instead to join an expedition
organized by the Union Pacifi c Roadway, Eastern Di-
vision (soon renamed the Kansas-Pacifi c) to determine
the best southern rail route from Kansas to California.
Through the infl uence of friends in Philadelphia and the
personal recommendation of John Lawrence LeConte
(1825–1883), the expedition’s geologist, Bell was ap-
pointed the expedition’s photographer, even though
he knew nothing about making photographs. He spent
two weeks learning the rudiments of the wet plate
process from John C. Browne, editor of Philadelphia