Family images adorn Angels card

SANDPOINT — With tens of thousands of images to choose from, the task of selecting one or two for a special project could be overwhelming. The passing of Sandpoint sweetheart Hazel Hall earlier this year, though, narrowed down the search for the perfect picture.

When asked to provide the cover and inside art for this year’s Angels Over Sandpoint Christmas Card (see sidebar) — an annual fundraising project that this season commemorates Hazel’s lifelong contribution to the town she loved — Dann Hall went into his Hallans Gallery archives and came up with photos as perfectly suited to one another as his parents were to one another.

The outside of the 2009 Angel’s holiday card bears a winterscape his mother took after she and her famous photographer husband, Ross Hall, spent the night visiting Russ Keene in the snow cave where he spent a winter on the top of Schweitzer. According to Angels member Beth Pederson, determining that Hazel should be the featured artist was a cinch. Arriving at just two pictures out of several great images proved more time-consuming.

“When I asked Dann, he was delighted with the idea, but it was not an easy choice because he have us so many to choose from,” Pederson said. “We finally decided on a picture that Hazel had taken for the cover and then included a sweet photo that Ross took of her as a young woman on the mountain.”

The cover photo (see inset) crackles with light, all dazzling whites and blues as the first hint of morning sun sets snow-covered branches alight with the look of a thousand tiny diamonds.

“She used to do quite a lot of winter photography,” Dann said. “That photograph is one Mother took when she was on the top of Schweitzer Ridge.”

“The picture of mom inside the card is a ridgetop shot dad took on Blacktail Mountain back in 1937,” he continued.

Now in its fourth year, the Angels Over Sandpoint Christmas Card fundraiser previously has featured the work of Clark Fork photographer Sarah Hazel and Sandpoint visual and fine tilework artist Gail Lyster.

“As we all discussed different ideas for this year, someone mentioned Hazel Hall because she was such a force in Sandpoint during all her years here,” said Angels member Perky Smith-Hagadone.

“She was the perfect pick for our card. Hazel raised her family here, worked alongside her husband, Ross Hall, doing their photography and she volunteered for myriad causes. We all consider her an Angel in the truest sense of the word.”

“She was such a remarkable woman and an inspiration to everyone who knew her,” Pederson added.

It was a mutual admiration society, according to Dann Hall.

“She had a connection with all those girls,” he said. “One of the reasons she thought so much of Sandpoint was because of groups like the Angels.”

At Hallans Gallery, the powerful black-and-white work of owner Dann Hall is displayed among the easily recognizable images of his photographer father. Now that interest in Hazel’s pictures appears to be on the rise, he seems completely at ease with the prospect of adding her prints to the artistic legacy for which he is the keeper of the keys.

“She was probably undercredited for most of her life for the work she did,” Dann said, adding that, along with hand-tinting all of the couple’s early prints before color film became available, Hazel acted as spotter for many of the pictures Ross captured and later ran the sizable studio operations so that he could be out in the field shooting photos.

As often as not, she was wielding her own 35-millimeter camera while Ross worked with his large-format photography equipment.

The couple’s studio amassed about 600,000 pictures, including more than 300,000 at the Farragut Naval Station during World War II and school photos of “most of the students in North Idaho,” Dann calculated. But it was the landscapes and hometown scenes that, as it turned out, proved to be the favorite photographic subjects for both Ross and Hazel. Their son already has cataloged much of Ross’s imagery. Now he has begun delving into his mother’s photos, as well.

“We probably have several thousand Kodachrome slides she had done,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll keep playing with both of their work until I keel over, because I’m continually finding new stuff.”