Life on the road: Art Sinsabaugh's Midwest Landscapes

Afterimage, July-August, 2005 by Stephen Longmire

NOTES

1. Carol diGrappa, ed., Landscape: Theory (New York: Lustrum Press, 1980), p. 131.

2. Ibid., p. 132.

3. Arthur Sinsabaugh, "The Midwest Landscape," (Master's Thesis, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1967) p. 10.

4. Brian Katz: telephone interview with the author, May 2005.

5. Keith F. Davis, American Horizons: The Life and Work of Art Sinsabaugh (New York/Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Indiana University Art Museum, 2004), p. 19.

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Bob Thall on Art Sinsabaugh and Photographing Chicago

"What was at issue was a new notion of photographic style: a potent
blending of formal and conceptual concerns in which personal
expression was apparently submerged in a rigorously systematic,
descriptive methodology."
--Keith Davis American Horizons: The Life and Work of Art Sinsabaugh
(2004)

"Really this is the New Topographics start," said Bob Thall, the Chicago photographer whose ongoing documentation of that city's built environment most resembles Sinsabaugh's--in spirit, if not in shape. I had asked him to talk about his predecessor's legacy, in the city where they both have worked. Thall pointed out how Sinsabaugh's work anticipated the landmark 1975 "New Topographics" exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, a show that proposed documentary landscape photography--or photographs of "a man-altered landscape," as it was subtitled--as the aesthetic and political alternative to the idealizing tradition of western landscape photography. "What's so interesting is that this work was there 10 years earlier, and it didn't have any effect," Thall observed.

Today many large format photographers depict place in layered ways that owe a debt to Sinsabaugh's achievement, whether they know his work or not. Thall was quick to point out how few photographers outside Chicago had the chance to get to know Sinsabaugh's work in any depth before the retrospective at the Indiana University Art Museum. The pictures simply weren't available, except to a select few. Thall was among those lucky few, and has built on the example, though his work reflects different times and circumstances.

Thall, who heads the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago, where he has long taught, is preparing the fourth in his cycle of books of large-format black and white photographs of his native city, all published with the help of the Virginia-based Center for American Places, on whose board he now sits. Cumulatively, the effort surely adds up to one of the largest surveys of its built environment Chicago has ever seen--though, unlike Sinsabaugh's, this one has no official patron or purpose. (Thall did once do occasional documentary work for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, but he makes a clear separation between this former day job and his own artwork.) Presciently, in an essay written to accompany the photographs he submitted as his Master's thesis to the Institute of Design in 1967, Sinsabaugh wondered if "a group of photographers may some day record Chicago in all its facets for future scholars and have meaning of an interdisciplinary nature." He was right about one, at least.