The New American Village (Creating the North American Landscape)

Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Vision of the New American Landscape
Review: Thall is a photographer and his photographs are marvelous: lucid, lovely, tonally rich, beautifully constructed. What's astonishing, though, is the way he has applied his sensibility to the least-liked spaces that increasingly dominate America and the globe: the "edge cities" of prefab warehouses for outsourced products, of instant townhouse communities (really trailer courts stacked upright) of malls and corporate "campuses." Most writing about this new American landscape excoriates it or, more rarely, argues that it's the landscape we want (ignoring that "we" aren't the architects, the patrons, or the developers). Thall seeks simply to look, to see what's remarkable, and then to communicate it, in pictures that embody the complex history of our newly decentralized human habitations. On the cover is a picture of two shocking office towers shot from a parking garage. Only one car is there: a beat-up Toyota station wagon perched impudently at off-angle to the resolute order of the rest of the space. That must be Thall's car; certainly it's the embodiment of the position he takes when he makes these pictures.

Rating:
Summary: beauty expanded
Review: The new American village is also the new American urban landscape. I'm very familiar with Bob's work since he was my teacher at Columbia College Chicago and I enjoyed tremendously his course in Architectural Photography.

Unlike his last book "Cityscapes" which in my opinion is the work of a mature artist, this one is more dependent on subject matter and clearly compromised with it. It is documentary and documental to a certain extent. Not really my cup of tea, yet I take great delight in imagining what some of those prints would look like since Bob is a great printer.

Great work!