Perched Rock, Rocker Creek, Arizona
William H. Bell American, born England
Commissioned by Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler American
Not on view
Bell’s full-frontal photograph of this boulder invites viewers to marvel at its improbable balance. A crouching figure, barely visible in the right foreground, gives a sense of the monolith’s sheer mass. Bell’s framing carves a tight vertical view out of the larger landscape, paring the scene to its essential components. Tempering the deadpan objectivity of a scientist with a sculptor’s sensitivity to form, he negotiates a new professional role—that of the survey photographer. In 1872, Bell joined an expedition for the Wheeler Survey, an initiative by the Army Corps of Engineers to record the topography of America’s western territories. Never intended for the halls of a museum, this and other photographs for the project were commissioned to illustrate the survey’s geological reports and promotional albums.
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