Douglas Kent Hall

Douglas Kent Hall (December 12, 1938 – March 30, 2008) was an American writer and photographer. Hall was a fine art photographer and writer of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, essays, and screenplays. His first published photographs were of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and his first exhibition of photographs was at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hall published twenty-five books, including two with Arnold Schwarzenegger. His photographs often cover subjects such as rock and roll musicians, rodeo, cowboys, prison, flamenco, bodybuilders, the U.S.-Mexico border, the American West, New Mexico, New York City, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Great Britain, Greece, Russia, Native Americans, writers, and artists. Hall's artistic output included collaborations with Larry Bell, Bruce Nauman, Terry Allen, and his son Devon Hall.

In 2008, following Hall's death, solo exhibitions of his photographs hung concurrently at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico; the Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico.

Hall was born in Vernal, Utah, to Phyllis Hiatt and Charles William "Peck" Hall. He was the oldest of two children. While Peck Hall was serving in the Navy during World War II, his marriage to Phyllis broke up and the two boys started living with their maternal grandmother, Beulah Perry. Hall's elementary and high school years were spent with his grandparents on rural farms in the Vernal area. He raised sheep and cows that he exhibited and sold at County Fairs. During high school Hall was a rodeo contestant.

At the age of seventeen, Hall entered Utah State University, Logan, to study creative writing. He transferred to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and then to Brigham Young University where he earned his bachelor's degree in English in 1960. At BYU Hall started lifelong friendships with Alfred L. Bush and David Stires. Bush became the Curator of Western Americana at the Firestone Library, Princeton University, and Stires became a publishing executive. Hall's undergraduate years included the study of the creative process with Brewster Ghiselin, editor of the book The Creative Process. Hall met and married Claire Nicholson of Boise, Idaho between his junior and senior years at BYU. The two remained married for ten years. Hall was accepted into the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. For three years he worked as a special assistant to Paul Engle, director of the program. While at the Writer's Workshop Hall befriended, among others, Mark Strand, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, and Adrian Mitchell. Hall wrote and published while at Iowa.

In 1963, Hall commenced a position at the University of Portland teaching Creative Writing and Literature. Hall and Claire moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1964. During his time at the University of Portland, Hall brought poets to the school for readings, including Allen Ginsberg, W. H. Auden, Anaïs Nin, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, William Stafford, and Robert Bly. Hall also became active in the American Writers Against the Vietnam War.[citation needed ] At this time a friend lent Hall a camera and he taught himself photography, studying photographic technique and style. He photographed poets and the group of artists he befriended in Portland, including Lee Kelly, Carl Morris, and Hilda Morris.

Hall's increasing interest in photography led to freelance photographic work. He photographed Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison of the Doors for Sunn Music, makers of amplifiers. He received commercial and magazine photographic assignments and realized he could dedicate himself to his writing and photography and left the world of academia.

In 1967, Hall traveled throughout England, France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Portugal with his cameras. He shot his first images in the Dark Landscapes series. In 1968, Hall moved from Portland to London and continued work in advertising and on his series of artist and writer portraits and his art photography. He began formulating the idea of Passing, which dominated most of the philosophy behind his personal work.

Hall and his wife moved from London to New York City in 1968. He continued to photograph rock and roll stars, which resulted in the publication of Rock: A World Bold as Love, released later in paperback as The Superstars: In Their Own Words. In New York, Hall continued writing. He published his first novel, On the Way to the Sky, in 1972. This book fictionalized Hall's childhood years in Vernal, Utah, and his relatives. Hall's time spent in the world of rock and roll led to his novel Rock and Roll Retreat Blues, published in 1974.

While driving across the country with Alfred Bush in 1969, Hall shot his first Passing series. In 1971, he developed the first negatives for Passing II.

Hall's marriage to Claire dissolved in 1970. He returned briefly to Portland, Oregon, and worked doing commercial photography jobs and writing. He met his future second wife, Dawn Claire Davidson, a fashion coordinator, in May 1971. The following December the two moved to New York and set up residence and studio in a loft on 21st Street and 7th Avenue.

In the 1970s, Hall lived in New York but spent much time traveling. His work included writing a book about rodeo titled Let Er Buck; writing and codirecting a feature documentary film about rodeo titled The Great American Cowboy, which won an Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary; and publishing a photography book titled Rodeo, which was followed in the early 1980s by another book about cowboys, this one about ranch cowboys, titled Working Cowboys. Mark Strand writes, "These cowboys, as opposed to urban cowboys, drugstore cowboys, rodeo cowboy, or movie cowboys, stay on horseback all day long working cattle. And when they stand in front of the camera—in Hall's best photos, they are standing, looking straight into the camera lens—their detached way of life shows."[10] The 1970s also saw the publication of Hall's second novel, Rock and Roll Retreat Blues. In 1974, Hall exhibited his photographs for the first time, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition and accompanying catalog, Photography in America, is where the public first viewed his photograph, Mesquite, Texas.[11]

During the latter half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, Hall worked on books collaboratively. In 1975, Hall's literary agent, Bob Dattila, asked him if he would be interested in working on a project with bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hall and Schwarzenegger published two books, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder and Arnold's Bodyshaping for Women. Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eleven weeks in 1978.[12] In 2002, Sports Illustrated included the Hall/Schwarzenegger collaboration as number 71 on their "Top 100 Sports Books of All Time".[13] During the writing and photographing of Bodyshaping for Women, Hall became acquainted with female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon; the friendship led to the publication of their book Lisa Lyon's BodyMagic.[14] The Incredible Lou Ferrigno, with bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno, rounded out Hall's collaborative publishing ventures with bodybuilders.[15]

In 1977, Hall and his partner moved from New York to the village of Alcalde, New Mexico. After living together for more than six years, they were married in Santa Fe on July 23, 1977. In 1980, their son Devon was born.[citation needed ]

Hall traveled throughout the Southwest and along the Mexico–U.S. border in the 1980s gathering material for two photographic books. The Border: Life on the Line introduced Hall to the varied types of people who live and work on both sides of the border. The book includes many color photographs.[16] Frontier Spirit: Early Churches of the Southwest also includes many color images.[17]

In 1992, Hall began printing with platinum. Also in the early 1990s, Hall traveled to Saint Petersburg, Russia, to document the Hermitage Museum's art school for children. He photographed in the students' homes and at the museum. During this period Hall also traveled to Minas Gerais, Brazil, to document the region's gold and gemstone miners.[18]

In the mid-1990s, Hall began producing his Zen Ghost Horses series with images of Peruvian Paso and Clydesdale horses exposed onto handmade paper that was brushed with emulsion. Hall embellished the works with gold leaf, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, and acrylics. Taking color images shot along the Mexico–U.S. border, Hall created a suite of artes de caja (art boxes). These pieces incorporate color photographs, poems, milagros, objects picked up while traveling the border, and pages from Mexican graphic novelettes into and on hand-painted wooden wine boxes. The Albuquerque Museum showed fifteen of the border boxes for four months as part of a tribute exhibition for Hall in 2008.[19]

After being awarded the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2005,[20] Hall's In New Mexico Light, a compilation of his images taken over a forty-year time span, was published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.[21]

In 2002, Hall's first collection of poems was published in Visionary. The book also contains an extended auto-memoir/poem.

Hall began studying and practicing Kaju Kenpo karate in Santa Fe in 1986, receiving his Nidan black belt in 1998. He taught karate in Española, New Mexico until 2002. While continuing to practice karate, Hall also incorporated Tai Chi into his daily spiritual practice. When photographer Joyce Tenneson selected Hall in 2004 for inclusion in her book Amazing Men, she photographed him working with martial arts weapons.[22]

Hall died suddenly at his home in Albuquerque on March 30, 2008; the cause of death was described as "a cardiac incident." He was survived by his wife, Dawn, and son, Devon Hall, a composer and pianist.[23][24]

Hall's first writing was fiction. His first novel, On the Way to the Sky, is set in Utah and explores themes that surface frequently in his work: small-town life, surviving a broken home, Mormonism, hunting and fishing, music, and rodeo.

His second novel, Rock and Roll Retreat Blues, is a commentary on the world of rock and roll and the culture it creates. According to a Publishers Weekly review,[25]

The third novel, The Master of Oakwindsor, set in 1908 England, explores the clash between rural England and a new and darker industrial Britain and between two families.

Hall wrote numerous books of nonfiction, which include his photographs, rodeo, cowboy life, bodybuilding, prison, the historic churches of the Southwest, and the border between the United States and Mexico.

Princeton University curator Alfred L. Bush writes:[26]

The protagonist in the Sam Shepard story "San Juan Bautista" says: "I'm more into faces—people; Robert Frank, Douglas Kent Hall, guys like that."[27] On the occasion of the exhibition in Santa Fe of Os Brasileiros (The Brazilians), David Bell notes,[28]

Hall, who has recently made several trips to Brazil and the Amazon, takes as his subjects not only the miners who were his first objective but families, farmers . . . and students, too. The result is a composite portrait of a people who in most cases appear to give themselves with equal abandon to the camera and to life.

Mark Strand noted in Vogue magazine,[29]

When discussing the complex relationship of a photograph to history, Hall noted to the author of Photography: New Mexico, Kristin Barendsen,[30]

Hall started out with a 35mm camera, added a 21 ⁄4 square format camera, and kept working with those two formats using Nikons, Leica Cameras, and Hasselblads. In the mid-1990s, he added digital cameras to his arsenal. In a Rangefinder magazine article, Hall said to author/photographer Paul Slaughter:[31]

Hall had five external hard drives. He said to Slaughter,

Hall used the Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom software programs for after-capture processing and did his own printing, both digital and traditional. He had four Epson inkjet printers. For digital printing, he favored watercolor papers. He told Slaughter:[31]

Hall's papers are held at Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections. The collection, which is open to researchers, consists of 101 boxes, spanning 93 linear feet.[32]