August 11, 1925 - January 5, 2020
About Cliff Hall, Photographer
Cliff Hall was born in 1925 and lived with his grandmother from 1930 until he joined the U.S. Navy in 1946. In Los Angeles he attended grammar, high, and technical schools until he joined the Navy, where he received special training in electronics.
After leaving the Navy, after a chance exposure through his friend, Wallace Arima, to Fred Archer School of Photography, Cliff studied photography. Cliff started his professional photography career by covering graduations and sweet sixteen parties for the children of Hollywood and Bel Air, California notables. His art and design background made his photographs, of especially formal events, outstanding in presentation and cohesiveness. To these talents he added his 3D and mechanical solutions to his work and to the benefit of his clients.
To his inspired photography, Cliff added the design and development of a van that allowed him to photograph, develop, and deliver pictures on-the-spot, before the end of an event.
During the 1950's and 60's Cliff did incomparable work in social and news photography, including covering the Los Angeles riots in the early 1990s.
Jessie Mae Brown Beavers, Executive editor and journalist for Los Angeles Sentinel, Commissioner of Human Relations, and activist, selected Cliff to photograph the annual "Los Angeles Best Dressed" celebration to promote the wives of Los Angeles Black professionals exhibiting the latest fashions, The individual photos and photo arrays created by Cliff were of such quality and became so popular that the Sentinel had to print several extra runs of this and other specials like the Links Cotillion for distributions to their home towns throughout the states.
Cliff was a mentor to several award-winning Hollywood and country-wide news and entertainment professional photographers as well as neighbors including, Lamonte McLemore of the musical group Fifth Dimension, Edmund "Rochester" Anderson, and Howard Bingham.
As busy as Cliff was doing entertainment and social photography, he was also a significant contributor to the documentation of the L.A. Riots of 1992.
In March of 2015, the California African American Museum honored Cliff Hall among other pioneering photographers ("Light Catchers" from March 20, 2015 to June 7, 2015). This exhibition featured the work of seven African American photographers active in Los Angeles since the 1940s: Howard Bingham, Don Cropper, Jack Davis, Bob Douglas, Cliff Hall, Lamonte McLemore, and Murphy Ruffins.