Wheeler Survey, Season of 1872 1872 William Bell American, born Britain By the time the government's appropriations for George Wheeler's 1872 expedition were made, Timothy O'Sullivan had already signed up with Clarence King's survey for the season. Wheeler therefore asked William H. Bell, a photographer who had worked for the American Medical Museum, to take O'Sullivan's place in his corps.Unlike O'Sullivan, who regarded the problem of landscape as a rational arrangement of vacancy and mass, Bell perceived landscape dramatically and vertically, related to the upright posture of man. Whereas O'Sullivan composed in a planar and lapidary fashion, carving out powerful blocks of tone, Bell composed in depth, setting off the plunging perspectives of the Grand Canyon against the rocks in the foreground. Here, from the shadow of the slanting overhang of a cliff, the viewer sees the blare of sun on the canyon's opposite wall like dawn's curtain rising.This photograph is part of the Colorado Riv