Rain Sculpture, Salt Creek Canon, Utah

In addition to operating his own photographic studio, William H. Bell served as staff photographer for the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., where he documented wounds received by soldiers during the Civil War. In 1872, he joined a surveying expedition led by Lt. George M. Wheeler, part of a larger governmental effort to assess and ultimately exploit the lands and resources of the West. The photographs that Bell took on the expedition were not only used as references for geologists and geographers, but were also sold as stereographs or, like this print, published in albums distributed to members of Congress by the War Department. Wheeler praised photography’s ability to quickly and easily record the details of “convoluted” rock formations like this one, “so suggestive of the folds of heavy drapery.”