How do you photograph a dull, vacuous place without making dull photographs?”
The New American Village is the second installment in Thall’s ongoing effort to document the Chicago area’s built environment. His first book, The Perfect City (1994), surveyed the changing face of the Loop between 1972 and 1991, a period of massive reconstruction. Made in a fourth of that time, between 1991 and 1996, The New American Village may be his most focused effort yet. In an epilogue to the first book, Thall compared his approach to literary nonfiction, because he too uses facts to tell stories. While his photographic method is straightforward, his goals are more oblique.
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“Maybe they’re just more honest. They’re saying a house is just an appliance. I need it for a while. We don’t spend a lot of time aestheticizing our refrigerator choices. Maybe their house, maybe their neighborhood is the same way. It’s approaching a neighborhood as a refrigerator. You buy a refrigerator, microwave, you buy a stereo unit–unless you’re a specialist you don’t fetishize these things. You get a standard one, you use it up, you move on, you throw it out. It’s always new, you buy it new. In some ways they’re treating their place like that out there, with new architecture. You buy a condo; it’s not too much different than going to Best Buy and getting a portable TV. You use it a few years and then move on.”
Another influence was the vacant urban scenes of Edward Hopper. “My father painted Edward Hopper paintings as a hobby,” Thall says. “He was an amateur painter, so I grew up in a rotating show of Edward Hopper’s work. He would sign his own name. It wasn’t fraud, but he would copy them as people do copy paintings, and then he’d give them away, so that there were constantly five or six Edward Hoppers hanging in our apartment. It would change slowly over the years. And then if we went to see his relatives, there would be Edward Hoppers hanging there too. I just take it for granted that inhabited landscape is the subject for art. It never even occurred to me that it wouldn’t be. It’s just a basic subject of art.”
Adelmann, who has sponsored several landscape photography undertakings through the Openlands Project, says the dispersing effect of the computer has been overemphasized. “You continue to have places of work that people have to get to,” he explains. “Since we’re dependent on real estate taxes to fund infrastructure, edge cities were subsidized by state and federal tax dollars.” He describes a pattern of continual outward movement from the historic urban centers, with developers building farther out, leaving the old infrastructure to decay while new services trail behind in a manner that sounds like a Ponzi scheme. A few states, like Maryland, have countered senseless sprawl by demanding that developers themselves fund the building of new roads and sewers.
