City Spaces

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by Bruno Chalifour

City Spaces. Photographs of Chicago Alleys by Bob Thall. The Center for American Places, 2002/96 p./$40.00 (hb).

This is the third book that Bob Thall has dedicated to the changing architecture of Chicago. After The Perfect city in 1994, and The New American Village in 1999, Thall focuses on the empty alleys of downtown Chicago in City Spaces. Fifty-four plates shot in black and white with a large format camera define a vision that positions Itself somewhere between the works of Lewis Baltz and Nicholas Nixon in the 1975 New Topographics and the even more formalistic cityscapes of Harry Callahan. The difference between Thall and the latter Is that Thall's alleys are totally deserted whereas Callahan hardly took an image without some trace of a human presence. When you look at Thall's images, always constructed around their center, or imagine Eleanor (Callahan's wife and eternal model) holding her daughter's hand, both standing in the middle ground, facing the camera, City Spaces becomes a humorous and tender spoof of Callahan's cityscapes. Whereas In The Perfect City Thall chose as his subject locations that could be cl early identified as being Chicago, whose renovation they also documented, City Spaces presents exactly what its title suggests: city spaces. The images could have probably been taken In any American metropolis for they include shots of soulless passages, gray concrete walls and neon-lit multistoried parking garages.

After first studying architecture, Thall moved on to photography--a subject that he now teaches at Columbia College, Chicago. His accomplished technical skills are complemented in the book by excellent reproductions. According to his introductory text, Thall seems to be taking-u& down "memory lane," but the lanes have evolved and changed and it is hard for the viewer, if not a native of Chicago, to see what the author projects onto the architecture that he photographs. Although he quotes Eugene Atget, as everyone who photographs a city seems to do, his approach has a tendency to mirror Charles Marville's in that his images do not have, for better or for worse, Atget's eerie atmosphere. They feel more distant and cool.. As stressed by the photographer himself, the difference is also that Atget did not publish any book, never won a Guggenheim Fellowship and surely never confessed to anyone he thought he "had earned a very small place in the history of photography." Posterity was bestowed upon Atget by Berenice Abbott and john Szarkowski. In other words, Thall's work has a tendency to feel a little self-indulgent. However, in slowly turning the pages of City Spaces there is a definite combination of sensitivity, intuition and vision that asserts itself, image after image, and gives the whole body of work a strong coherence and an aesthetic consistency that probably saves the project from the usual pitfalls of such endeavors.