Bob Thall

(American, b. 1948)

Chicago, (Near O’Hare), 1991

Bob Thall is known for formally rigorous and deadpan portrayals of the urban and suburban landscape in Chicago. The photograph Chicago (Near O’Hare) is part of a series he produced in the 1990s that focused on the “edge cities” of Chicago — the too-quickly constructed suburban communities surrounding the urban center and older suburban ring. Capturing the sleek artificiality of these recent rootless developments, the image conveys the power, pervasiveness and emptiness of suburban corporate architecture. This work was published in 1999 as the book The New American Village.

Thall was born in 1948 in Chicago and received a BA and MFA in photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been a professor of photography since 1976 at Columbia College Chicago and is currently chair of the photography department. Thall is a recipient of a 1998 John F. Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. The New American Village pictures were shown in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, in 1999. His photographs are included in many collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Thall, Bob. City Spaces: photographs of Chicago alleys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Thall, Bob. The Perfect City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Thall, Bob. The New American Village. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.