Bob Thall

January 6, 2005 - January 29, 2005

Bob Thall’s deserted Chicago alleys are quiet city portraits, short stories about architecture, history, and layers of human interaction with the gritty streets and crumbling brick walls. Whether carefully composed shots of intersecting side streets converging on a factory building, or the symmetry of concrete parking structures framed with a rectangle of sky above, his photographs resonate a subtle haunting, personality and tactile sensibility. He writes, “Smelly, dirty, dark, occasionally a bit dangerous, these alleys were not physically pleasant places to work…I felt submerged in a dark, murky pool. Emerging from an alley after an hour of timing long exposures could feel like rising to the surface. Still…investigating these spaces reminded me of my earlier sense of the city as a mysterious landscape to explore.” His book, -City Spaces, published in 2002, documents the entire series.