Gary Stochl was walking down Milwaukee Avenue east of Halsted in January 2003 when he saw a funky storefront gallery that had an exhibit of street photography. He pushed through the rusted security grating and went inside.
Stochl’s only formal training in photography was a class he took in high school. “The instructor left me on my own to do my own thing,” he says. So that’s what he did. And he kept doing it while he was in the army in the 60s and during the years that followed. He taught himself to see by looking at the books of classic street photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. He bought a 35-millimeter Leica in 1968 and shot in black and white, using only a 50-millimeter lens. He says using a telephoto or wide-angle lens would be “unnatural. That’s not the way we see things with our eyes.” He made prints in the darkroom he built in the house he shared with his parents in suburban Stickney.
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“I walk everywhere, from the north side to the south side and back again,” he says. “I’m in good shape, with a lot of energy. If I was in a car I couldn’t do my photography well. You have to walk from place to place to capture the moments I’m interested in.”
Stochl has taken many photographs in which a natural barrier like a tree, a corner, or a window frame divides the image into two visual fields. “My visual strategy is geometric,” he says. In one such shot a white man in a suit and a black man in a funky cap are reflected in two corner windows, both of their faces downcast. “I don’t think I’ve ever taken a photograph of a person smiling,” he says. “That’s not my attitude. If you look at my photos you’ll see a strong current of pessimism.”
Hirte says the gallery got its start back in 1995. He and some friends were drinking in a nearby bar when a local muralist pulled up in a van with a sign on the side identifying her as a “fine artist.” He says, “I made the comment that all I wanted to be was a not-so-fine artist.” He and a dozen friends decided to call themselves the Not So Fine Artists Society, and they put up drywall in the front of Hirte’s building to create an exhibition space. It eventually morphed into Gallery Chicago and now exhibits the work of the friends, including Leavitt and Pocius.
Hirte says he saw in Stochl “somebody with an awful lot of talent, but he was so isolated. I talked to him like he was one of my children, trying to improve his self-esteem.”
Another Gallery Chicago regular suggested that Stochl take his photos to Columbia College. It took him months to work up the courage. “I wasn’t used to dealing with institutions,” he says. “I felt this powerful inner resistance.” In April, Hirte went with him to Columbia. They heard that a teacher would be looking at student portfolios a couple days later, and Stochl decided to go and hope she wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t enrolled. When he showed up he found out that she hadn’t come in because her mother was sick. While he was standing there trying to decide what to do, in walked Bob Thall, the chairman of the photography department.
