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“Photographs by Del Hall” at 3rd Coast Cafe

An Emmy-award winning cameraman chronicles a life in a snap.

By Madeline Nusser

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“I wanted to work for LIFE magazine. I thought that’d be the coolest thing,” says Hall, who shot this photo as a young Western Union messenger in 1952 in his hometown, New Orleans. From a tender age, Hall decided to drag a camera everywhere (even toting a point-and-shoot to our interview). For this exhibit, Hall gave photos colorful captions, like this one: “Internet Victim Western Union, Everywhere, 1952.”
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After working as a U.S. Air Force photographer, Hall moved back to New Orleans and took a job at a local TV station. In the ’60s, Hall covered school integration (“you’re running from the Klan and trying to stay alive”) and the Vietnam War, and he helped create a documentary of Rome (“They thought it would class up the station”). Dan Rather occasionally picked up his footage on the national evening news. Hall believes he placed his film camera on a tripod while he snapped this shot of Kennedy in the streets of New Orleans.
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Hall has captured New Orleans’s characters, its jazz funerals, celebrities and strippers (pictured).
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In 2006, Hall, along with wife and business partner Ginger, shuttered their 25-year-old production company (where they worked on 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News segments). Around that time, Hall finished a video of Millennium Park in the making. This photo captured Jaume Plensa by his fountain. The caption reads: “He expected his creation to become a place of quiet contemplation, never the children’s delight it has really become.”
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These days, the Halls still work on video projects with nonprofits. And he still totes a camera everywhere he goes. Last summer, near Oak Street, Hall captured this couple diving into Lake Michigan. According to Hall, “Most great photos aren’t a result of talent, but opportunity.”
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“I wanted to work for LIFE magazine. I thought that’d be the coolest thing,” says Hall, who shot this photo as a young Western Union messenger in 1952 in his hometown, New Orleans. From a tender age, Hall decided to drag a camera everywhere (even toting a point-and-shoot to our interview). For this exhibit, Hall gave photos colorful captions, like this one: “Internet Victim Western Union, Everywhere, 1952.”

Photo: Del Hall

05/17/2011

In his five-decade career, cameraman Del Hall has endured what most people have merely witnessed from an armchair: fleeing the Klan in the 1960s, being surrounded by the pop of bullets while on a spotter plane in Vietnam, getting a police beat-down at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Much of what he experienced, he photographed as a news camera operator for CBS in New Orleans and Chicago—a career that came to a brief halt after a 1974 helicopter crash, which Hall miraculously survived. In a display of photographs at Gold Coast’s 3rd Coast Cafe (1260 N Dearborn St), the inimitable cameraman looks back at his life and work.

“Photographs by Del Hall” runs through June 15.