Peter Bacon Hales (born 13 November 1950) is an American historian, photographer, author, and musician specializing in American spaces and landscapes, the history of photography, and contemporary art.
Hales is Chair and professor in the Department of Art History and director of the American Studies Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He graduated from Haverford College in 1972, earning a B.A. in English and American Literature. After a time in New York working as a photographer and musician, he moved to Texas to begin his graduate education under the photographers Russell Lee and Garry Winogrand. He received both his M.A. (in 1976) and Ph.D. (1980) from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in American Civilization under the tutelage of cultural historians William H. Goetzmann and William Stott. His 1984 text Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839—1915 charted the transformation of America through the mass-production and distribution of photographs; its Visual Culture focus on the rapidly urbanizing nation through exploration of U.S. photographers and photographs from antebellum America to World War I represented one of the first comprehensive studies of urban photography from a cultural-history standpoint.
His attention turned from urban America to the changes in its physical and cultural geography as westward expansion, settlement, and industrialization resulted in a transcontinental American culture. His second book, William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape used the life of a single photographer-artist-writer-explorer-painter whose life spanned 99 years, as a means to trace the changes in American attitudes toward the land. Over the next decades, his work expanded from the history of photography to wider studies of technology, modernization and land use. He published essays, contributions, monographs and catalog essays on topics ranging from the World's Columbian Exposition, methods of rephotographic surveying, and the geography of the art history survey text, to the images of atomic-tests in Life during the Cold War. His study of the "forced cultural landscapes" of the Manhattan Project, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (1997) was runner-up for the Parkman Prize in American History and winner of the Herbert Hoover Prize in 20th Century American History. He has collaborated with a number of photographers and coauthors, including the photographers Mark Klett and Bob Thall; he has also served as a consultant and photographer for two large urban documentary projects centered in Chicago: the Changing Chicago Project of the later 1980s, for which he photographed social rituals of the upper class, and City2000, for which he served as historian-consultant and contributed large-format images of domestic spaces.
In 2006, he published an extensively revised and enlarged version of his first book, now renamed Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939; the new version included more sophisticated studies of race, ethnicity and gender, and extended the work well into the 20th century, including studies of the urban photography of the Farm Security Administration.
In the beginning of the 21st century, his attention turned to the virtual world, both as subject and as means of gathering and presenting historical and cultural information. With his colleague Robert Bruegmann, he developed a website collecting and organizing visual documentation of the Chicago built environment, the Chicago Architecture Imagebase[1]; in addition, he has developed a collaborative public-history project on the postwar American suburb, Levittown, Long Island, [2]He is currently working on several texts, including a continuation of his Silver Cities project entitled Outside the Gates: Intrusions on the American Landscape Since 1945. Further projects exploring the cultural landscape and virtual geographies of America include extended meditations on freeways, contrails and airports, the development of virtual environments such as MUDs (Multi-user dungeons), early interactive computer games such as Zork, and more contemporary incarnations of virtual environments like the Sims and Second Life.
