Unlike
the majority of the photographic explorers, who are constantly
clicking away at the American West, Douglas Kent Hall? camera
is firmly rooted in the region? very center. He was born on the
dinosaur-laden stratigraphics of eastern Utah bordering the Ute
Reservation. He grew up with cowboys and Indians, even though
his education, continuing into graduate school at the Iowa Writers
Workshop, persistently polished him, the cowboy remained.
It
is understandable, then, that the most stereotyped of the West?
inhabitants - the cowboys, the Indians, the Spanish - should emerge
in Hall? photographs as so newly seen. The cowboy appears with
a gentleness, the Matachines with a ferocious splendor, the Indians
with a specificity that engages us anew. Hall? Western icons -
the indelible view of the cowboy boots at Mesquite, Texas; the
aged Pueblo priest at Picuris; the masked Matachine with death
head palma - stay in our memories with the persistence of the
geological formations of his birthplace.
Touring
in Europe, Mexico, South America, Brazil, and Japan, and longer
residences in London and New York City, established him as a photographer
whose work is part of important collections, both public and private.
But travel also confirmed his place as a Westerner. Years ago,
Hall settled into a frontier as different, as difficult, and as
proudly resistant as even the nineteenth century seldom offered:
a village whose roots reach back to the sixteenth century on New
Mexico? Rio Grande. His Matachines photographs, as exotic as Morocco,
and probably historically linked, attest not only to the village?
vigorous cultural survival, but to Hall? own skills as an observer,
and even more impressively, an observer with a camera.
