Gary Stochl
American photographer (born 1947)
Gary Stochl (born 1947) is a street photographer who lives in Stickney, Illinois, just outside Chicago. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and published in the book On City Streets: Chicago 1964-2004. Stochl made photographs for 40 years before showing them to anyone.
Life and work
Stochl has been taking photographs since he was 17 years old. In the late 1960s he was inspired by the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. He bought a Leica camera and started taking pictures, his only formal education in photography being a course in high school. Later he was inspired by the work of Robert Frank.
Stochl spent 40 years photographing people on the streets of Chicago without showing them to anyone. In October 2003 he had a solo exhibition at a small Chicago gallery "that went mostly unnoticed." In the Spring of 2004, he went to the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago and met Bob Thall, the Chair of the Photography Department. Thall was told by his secretary that someone wanted to show him some pictures.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15500935. VIAF identifies the subject as 7128333. The Library of Congress control number is no2005082772. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1964, 2004 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gary Stochl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.