Lifetime Achievement - 2006 George Hall

The Board of the International Society of Aviation Photography has unanimously voted this year to bestow its annual Lifetime Achievement Award to Mr. George Hall, of Tiburon, California. It’s rare that we can agree on anything, let alone unanimously, so it’s a pretty big deal.

George grew up in the hard-world steel town of Gary, Indiana, where by all accounts he was a pretty normal boy, more interested in ham radio than planes or cameras. He was a very smart kid, all A’s in high school, and when Stanford accepted him, he lit off for California and never looked back. He majored there in history because, he says, —back then, history was important, because it taught you how to find things, back when that was a hard thing to do, before computers and Google and internet databases.

San Francisco was a vibrant music center at the time. George had started noodling with photography, so on one of his visits to the Fillmore, he brought along the school’s Hasselblad and a tripod. He photographed the band with a long exposure that registered them and the psychedelic stage lighting. A copy got to Bill Graham, who ran it as a two-page ad in Variety and mailed a check for $500 to George, which is worth probably $5000 today. It was George’s first sale.

He joined the army after Stanford, working in military intelligence. He spent the next few years after that at Cal Berkeley getting a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning. The degree landed him a city-planning job. Couldn’t stand it. He once described it as a year spent denying people permission to do things. But during that time he stumbled into a big Annual Report job, the kind that paid thousands of dollars, and it was his tipping point. He quit his day job in 1968, and as he puts it, he’s never really worked since.

His first foray into aviation was The Blimp Book. He pre-sold 5,000 to Goodyear and it showed the flair that would become George’s trademark: strong idea, superb photographs, great design, and innovative marketing. When Flying magazine decided to do a cover story on the blimp, George was an obvious choice. The article was a great hit. A little later they came back to George and asked if he’d like to do a story on this new Canadian jet team, the Snowbirds, and off he went. For the next weeks he flew all their missions, probably 50 hours in the cockpit, getting real comfortable pulling G’s. Once again it was a big cover story and suddenly he was the Jet Photographer. He was the guy who had experience in the cockpit, and there weren’t very many back then. His career developed quickly after that, with books on the Air Force in Europe and Red Flag and Top Gun.

By 1980 he had a large photo library of military jets, air-to-air views that nobody else had. He brought them together with shots by a few others photographers to found the Check Six stock agency. Backed with strong ads in the Black Book, and helped by the Reagan military buildup, things clicked right away. It was one of the first niche stock agencies, combining unique views and smart management.

That smart management came by way of a smart merger. George met Nicky Wolf in 1982 and things clicked right away there too. Nicky is George’s equal in every way. She’s smart, funny, ethical and charming, and blessed with a business sense that perfectly complements George’s skills. George gets the spotlight tonight, but Nicky, his wife and his partner for 25 years now, shares it also.

Another fruitful relationship started up about then, when George began doing stills for Clay Lacy on Astrovision air-to-air filming missions. George has done about 600 of these jobs with Clay now, crouched in a tiny Learjet and producing an unmatched library of airliner shots.

Along the way, he brought out his Air Power calendar. He conceived of it as a promo piece and thought he might sell a few extra copies to defray expenses. Instead it caught the rising tide from Top Gun the movie and became an instant retail success. 22 years later it’s still going, surrounded by competitors but still number one.

What does he do to let off steam? He puts on a big old Stetson and goes out dancing. Line dancing. Hedy McAdams, a longtime friend and a dance instructor, wrote to say that “he has excellent timing and footwork and an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He’s put it all together a few times and choreographed complete dances.” She goes on to note that he is nonetheless a bit of a maverick—in couples dancing he sort of ignores the conventions and leads the way he wants to. No surprises there. She adds that he’s fearless in his dancing. He dances to a different drummer, but his drummer always keeps perfect time.

I’ll tell you two other things about George Hall you might not know: he is a writer, and he is totally fascinated by the mystique of firefighting. The result has been a series of books, both fiction and non-fiction. He is hard at work on the third of a five-volume set of novels that centers on the exploits of an arson whiz named Francis X. Toomey. Book One, called Ring of Fire, was published in 2004, and Book Two is on the presses. They’re great beach reads and I highly recommend them—George writes exactly like he talks, with precision and wit.

His enthusiasm led him and Nicky to start up Code Red in 1994, a very specialized stock library that covers firefighting, rescues, natural emergencies and extreme weather. Their newest enterprise is PlanePix, started with John Dibbs as an internet gallery for people wanting to buy archival quality aviation photographs. George has sifted through scores of collections, both old and new, and come up with a candy store of images. It’s another George Hall industry first.

Photographer, writer, publisher, stock agency, husband, dancer, choreographer, and industry leader.