by
Tom Yanul
Photographer known for panoramic shots of Chicago
Photographer Thomas Yanul combined an artist's eye for his favorite subjects, especially Chicago and its architecture and large social gatherings, with the patience and vision it took to design, build and use the large format and specialized panoramic cameras needed for his work.
Mr. Yanul, 74, died of complications from lung cancer Monday, March 24, in his Oak Lawn home, according to his friend Susan Doctors.
Long before software programs that stitch together a series of separately photographed images to construct a wide angle view, Mr. Yanul was capturing such images on film in a single "take," using custom-designed and built cameras with rotating lenses capturing images on outsized negatives.
"The lens makes a great sweep of 270 degrees and you get a negative that's 24 inches long and 12 inches high and you get a spectacular picture," said Paul Kruty, a retired professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Years ago, Kruty also helped Mr. Yanul with some of his photographs of banquets and similar events, producing remarkable shots that showed every face in a large crowd in sharp focus.
"He had a banquet camera with a large negative," Kruty said, adding that Mr. Yanul used flashbulbs to light those shots.
"He used 50 flashbulbs and it could take five hours to set up one shot."
Mr. Yanul was born and grew up on the Southwest Side of Chicago, graduating from Gage Park High School.
He spent some time in the Air Force, including in Alaska and Newfoundland. On his website, he listed a number of jobs, from busboy to newspaper reporter, but he was always drawn to photography.
"Photography had been a growing obsession with him for quite a while and eventually he decided to try to make a living at it," said his brother Richard.
By the early 1970s, Mr. Yanul was working as a photographer for the Illinois Historic Structure Survey, an effort to identify and document Illinois buildings of architectural interest.
The project was to identify pre-World War II buildings, an inventory of state architectural resources, according to Kruty, who met Mr. Yanul while working on the survey around 1975.
"Tom was the photographer for the project," said Kruty, adding that the survey covered towns with a population of 500 or more and eventually identified 50,000 architecturally interesting buildings.
The focus on architecture was a natural for Mr. Yanul, who took that to new heights with his panoramic photos of Chicago shot from rooftops and other high vantage points around the city.
Late in 1988, Mr. Yanul talked with the Tribune about those photos.
"When I started shooting panoramas from rooftops in 1985, I wanted to shoot everything — record it all. The architecture in Chicago is changing so fast," he said.
As part of that desire to document the city and its structures, Mr. Yanul arranged for much of his work to be acquired by the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"We received the collection of his photos last year, most of his Chicago-based work," said Peggy Glowacki, manuscripts librarian at UIC. She said the material is still being processed in preparation for making it available for researchers.
"He was getting to a point in his life when he wanted to ensure that his work would be useful, that it would last," Glowacki said.
"He had a romantic view of life," Doctors said. "He thought history should be recorded."
He expressed the same thought to the Tribune in 1988. "I'm leaving my photographs behind. That's my legacy."
Mr. Yanul's wife, Natalia, died in 2010.
Services were held.
