At City's Edge : Photographs of Chicago's Lakefront (Center for American Places-Center Books on American Places)

Over the past four decades, Bob Thall has turned the view camera on the American city with increasing sophistication and adventurousness.  In the process, he has earned a place within the rich tradition of America's critical landscapists, a lineage that stretches back to Timothy O'Sullivan and Carlton Watkins.  From the sublime topographics of Chicago's skyscraper Rockies to the obsessively attentive micro-ecologies of urban alleys and the bland expanses of exurban townsites, Thall has staked a claim as one of the most rigorous of cultural analysts.  Now he has turned to the edge of things, to Chicago's lakefront, the boundary line where the everyday meets the absolute, in pictures at turns bafflingly graceful, religiously quiet, and sternly austere.  This is masterful work by an artist still enamored with the possibilities of his time, his place, and his medium."-Peter Bacon Hales