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, and writers and artists.

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 also spent his elementary and high school years on rural farms in the Vernal area with his grandparents.

[1] At the age of seventeen, Hall entered Utah State University, Logan to study creative writing.

[3] While at the Writer's Workshop, Hall befriended, among others, Mark Strand, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, and Adrian Mitchell.

[citation needed] At this time a friend lent Hall a camera and he taught himself photography, studying photographic technique and style.

He received commercial and magazine photographic assignments and realized he could dedicate himself to his writing and photography, which led him to leave the world of academia.

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.

In 1975, Hall's literary agent, Bob Dattila, asked him if he would be interested in working on a project with bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Also in the early 1990s, Hall traveled to Saint Petersburg, Russia, to document the Hermitage Museum's art school for children.

[1] During this period Hall also traveled to Minas Gerais, Brazil, to document the region's gold and gemstone miners.

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.

[1] Hall began studying and practicing Kaju Kenpo karate in Santa Fe in 1986, receiving his Nidan black belt in 1998.

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.

According to a Publishers Weekly review,[25] The book is chock-full of familiar contemporary figures—Hells Angels, revolutionaries, people spaced out on religion or brown rice or drugs, even such exotics as the "plaster casters."

Yet Hall is fresh and funny, and he makes Artie's [the protagonist's] search for his own psyche very real and very much a part of our times.

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] 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.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.

Mark Strand noted in Vogue magazine,[29] 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.When discussing the complex relationship of a photograph to history, Hall noted to the author of Photography: New Mexico, Kristin Barendsen,[30] that a photograph imparts the illusion of permanence, when in fact the scene depicted no longer exists.

That is part of my imagery evolvement.Hall used Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom software programs for after-capture processing and did his own printing, both digital and traditional.

He told Slaughter:[31] I am often upset that I can no longer readily find traditional printing supplies... That concerns me more than thinking about where photography is going.

I think the world of professional photography is much like it has always been, full of challenge.Hall's papers are held at Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.