Bob Thall

Courtesy of the artist.

Bob Thall is known for formally rigorous and deadpan portrayals of the urban and suburban landscape in Chicago, photographing in black and white, and using a view camera. The featured photograph is part of a full series of images of the area east of Michigan Avenue, and between Randolph Street and the Chicago River. When Thall first began photographing the area forty-five years ago, it was an abandoned train yard. This more recent photograph represents the area’s transformation into the dense urban area of today.

In the mid-1980s, Thall participated in the Changing Chicago Project, one of the largest documentary photography projects ever organized in a US city. The project was sponsored by the Focus/Infinity Fund of Chicago, founded by photographer and philanthropist Jack Jaffeand launched in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Farm Security Administration documentary project. That project employed thirty-three photographers of various styles to create a multifaceted record of the city’s diverse urban and suburban neighborhoods and inhabitants, culminating in concurrent exhibitions across Chicago’s major museums as well as a book titled Changing Chicago: A Photodocumentary (1989). Thall’s works are widely collected, including numerous photographs in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago.

Bob Thall received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1998. He taught photography at Columbia College Chicago for almost four decades, serving as chair of the department for twelve of those years.