Douglas Kent Hall - Photographs

Photographs

Many of Hall's images have become known as icons of Americana, such as Mesquite, Texas 1973, and Jim Morrison, Portland. Princeton University curator Alfred Bush writes: "Unlike the majority of the photographic explorers, who are continually clicking away at the American West, Douglas Hall's camera is firmly rooted in the region's very center." Hall's photographs are mainly of people; he finds his subjects worldwide, from New York to the Southwest, from Russia to Japan, Brazil to Mexico, as well as in places like Morocco and the Outer Hebrides Islands. On the occasion of the exhibition in Santa Fe of Os Brasilieros (The Brazilians), David Bell notes, "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." He continued to work in film and branched into digital imagery, shooting both color and black-and-white. Hall crossed the digital photography boundary by moving into fine art color photographs printed on handmade watercolor paper. Mark Strand noted in Vogue Magazine, "There is nothing provisional about Hall's enterprise; it is both broad and, in individual photographs, scrupulously resolved. His pictures have an edge, a magical certainty about them that not only justifies but also honors their subjects, no matter how odd or how exploited." Writing about Hall's 2007 book In New Mexico Light, Dave Gagon notes, "A filmmaker and poet, as well as a photographer, Hall has photographed and written about New Mexico's unique mix of places and people, a broad representation including ancient sites and Spanish churches, Indian ceremonial dances, portraits of artists and writers, viejos and vagabonds. He invigorates his 182 black and white photographs with descriptive prose—something most visual artists have difficulty achieving." In his Foreword to In New Mexico Light actor/playwright Sam Shepard writes, "The photographs in this book are naked impressions of the mind and spirit just waiting for somebody as lucky and gifted as Douglas Kent Hall to hunt them down and seize them with a little black box." When discussing the complex relationship of a photograph to history, Hall noted to the author of Photography: New Mexico, Kristin Barendsen, "that a photograph imparts the illusion of permanence, when in fact the scene depicted no longer exists. What's more, he said, the photograph does not represent exactly what its maker saw. It takes on a life of its own, and because each viewer experiences it differently, the image reflects an essence of the viewer. 'That's not my photograph,' he said, pointing to his most famous image, Mesquite, TX, hanging in his studio. 'It belongs to the viewer.'"