City Spaces
January 6 – 29, 2005
Bob Thall’s deserted Chicago alleys are quiet city portraits, short stories about architecture, history, and layers of human interaction with the gritty streets and crumbling brick walls. Whether carefully composed shots of intersecting side streets converging on a factory building, or the symmetry of concrete parking structures framed with a rectangle of sky above, his photographs resonate a subtle haunting, personality and tactile sensibility. He writes, “Smelly, dirty, dark, occasionally a bit dangerous, these alleys were not physically pleasant places to work…I felt submerged in a dark, murky pool. Emerging from an alley after an hour of timing long exposures could feel like rising to the surface. Still…investigating these spaces reminded me of my earlier sense of the city as a mysterious landscape to explore.” His book, -City Spaces, published in 2002, documents the entire series.
Bob Thall received both his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Thall, has photographed the Chicago landscape for many decades. Those photographs have been published in four monographs: The Perfect City (1994), The New American Village (1999), City Spaces (2002), and At City’s Edge: Photographs of the Chicago Lakefront (2005).
His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and others.
Bob Thall was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1998. He taught Photography at Columbia College Chicago for almost forty years, serving as Chair of the department for twelve of those years.