William Bell

William H. Bell was an English-born American photographer in the latter half of the 19th century. Many of his photographs documenting war-time diseases and combat injuries were published in the medical book, Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, and he took photographs of western landscapes taken as part of the Wheeler expedition in 1872. In his later years, he wrote articles on the dry plate process and other techniques for various photography journals.

In 1846, at the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, Bell traveled to Louisiana and joined the 6th Infantry.

After the end of the war in 1848, Bell returned to Philadelphia, and joined the daguerreotype studio of his brother-in-law, John Keenan. In 1852, he opened his own studio on Chestnut Street, and would operate or co-manage a photographic studio in downtown Philadelphia for much of the remainder of his life. In 1862, following the outbreak of the Civil War, Bell enlisted in the First Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, and saw action the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg.

After the war, Bell joined the Army Medical Museum, now the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington, D.C., as its chief photographer. He spent much of 1865 making photographs of soldiers with various diseases, wounds, and amputations, many of which were published in the book, Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. He also took portraits of dignitaries visiting the museum, and photographed Civil War battlefields. In 1867, he returned to Philadelphia, where he purchased the studio of James McClees.

In 1872, Bell joined George Wheeler's survey expedition, which was tasked with surveying American lands west of the 100th meridian, as a replacement for photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan. As part of the expedition, he captured numerous large format and stereographic landscapes of relatively unexplored areas of the Colorado River basin in Utah and Arizona. While on the expedition, he experimented with the dry plate process, for which he would eventually become an expert.

After the expedition, Bell returned to his studio in Philadelphia, and exhibited his work at the city's 1876 Centennial Exposition. Following the exposition, he sold his Chestnut Street studio to his son-in-law, William H. Rau. In 1882, Bell was hired by the U.S. Navy as a photographer for its Transit of Venus expedition. While traveling to Patagonia, where the Transit was observed, Bell took a series of photographs of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden in Brazil.

Bell spent most of his later years doing studio work and writing technical articles for journals such as Photographic Mosaics and the Philadelphia Photographer, though he traveled to Europe in 1892 to photograph paintings for the Columbia World's Fair.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023