Customer Reviews

City Spaces: Photographs of Chicago Alleys (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)

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Bob Thall has been making marvelous photographic books from marvelous big-camera photographs for more than a decade. He's also been systematically investigating the city of Chicago as a test case for the 21st century city. PERFECT CITY began by looking at the creative destruction of an architecturally significant and economically vibrant American urban downtown; THE NEW AMERICAN VILLAGE then looked at the new "urbanism" of what Joel Garreau has called the Edge Cities that have sprung up along the interstates and tollroads at a safe distance from the old metropolis. Now with CITY SPACES, he's tackling the newest phenomenon of American urbanism: the nostalgic return of downtowns as places to work, live, and be entertained. It's Thall's quirky intelligence at work that a collection of photographs of alleys could become a book about the resurgence of the old city, but that's what he shows us-- the way the city's encrustations of history, its graffiti, old signs, strange corners, odd spaces, and once-vibrant functional loading docks have become objects of nostalgic reverie, and Thall offers to be our guide in this visual treasure-hunt. This is a photographer of decidedly modernist sentiments. The play of subtle light on worn brick, the way mirror glass recedes deceptively into a non-existent, yet absurdly convincing surreal skyscape, the delight you feel as things line up into sensuous arrays when you stand precisely THERE and tilt your head like THIS and bend your knees oh-so-slightly: these are the matters of this book. Such visual sleight-of-sight requires superb printing to work in a book; luckily the Icelandic printers have labored with Nordic determination and the results are astonishing: blacks as smooth as velvet but still retaining a sense of detailed dark space; silvery sheens to steel, walls that crumble as you look at them.

Bob Thall happens to have been my Photo/Darkroom 1 teacher in college back in the late 80s. This gentleman is the bomb! Hey, I already got my grades, so I have absolutely nothing to gain here! Going into the class, I had, to put it mildly, a very poor eye for photography. I mean, anyone can use a camera. However Bob enabled me to acquire a real appreciation for photography as an art form, to the extent that I am still taking photographs, almost every day of my life, literally! In fact, I recommend to every serious student that I meet (I am still taking classes!) to enroll in a Photo/Darkroom 1 class with Bob Thall. He has helped imbue me with an artistic sense and keen eye that is helpful in any art class or artistic related endeavor. OK now about the book: It rocks! While some consider his work dry (he said it himself almost 20 years ago), if you take a close and careful look at every aspect of his work including content, composition, shooting, printing, etc., you may see what I see... Who else could make a photograph of a Chicago alley look so darn beautiful?!

This is the third installment in Thall's photographic exploration of the Chicago urban landscape, following The Perfect City (Creating the North American Landscape) (1994) and The New American Village (Creating the North American Landscape) (1999), and preceding At City's Edge: Photographs of Chicago's Lakefront (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places) (2005). City Spaces is my favorite of the four. Thall uses his 4x5 view camera to explore the "urban slits" where Chicago's fabric is exposed. In an eloquent essay, he explains that alleys are like historical palimpsests, places that escape the constant renovation and reconstruction of the rest of the city. Taken together, the four books are an incredible project unlike any other that a contemporary photographer has published about an American city.