My friend Libby Hall, who has died aged 81, was a talented street and press photographer, writer and collector.
Her collection of thousands of vintage dog photographs was published as four books by Bloomsbury between 2000 and 2007, then acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute, which called it “possibly the largest number of canine pictures ever gathered by any single person”.
Libby taught herself photography from Popular Photography magazine after receiving a Box Brownie for her seventh birthday. After leaving the Rudolf Steiner school in New York at 16, she worked for six months in the photo lab at Life magazine, then at Village Voice as distribution manager.
At 18, she moved to Vienna, where she took the photographs of which she was most proud. A friendship with the American photojournalist Walker Evans helped her refine her technique.
Having moved to Suffolk in the mid 1960s to work at AS Neill’s Summerhill school, she documented life in her local pub, the Engineer in Leiston, in a series of photographs following the opening of a nuclear power station in nearby Sizewell.
Libby was born in New York to William McKinley Osborne II, a newspaperman, restaurateur and clerk, and Charlotte (nee Cameron), a designer and antique-store owner. The family, by Libby’s account, flitted between Manhattan, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine.
From 1960, while living in Vienna, she began a four-year relationship with Arthur S (Anand) Lall, an Indian diplomat and writer, and was subsequently briefly married to Peter Wood. Meeting the writer John Berger in a Genevan supermarket in 1964 began a lifelong friendship. I met her later through writing Berger’s biography. But it was while she was a press photographer for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) in London in 1966 that she met the political cartoonist Tony Hall; they settled in Clapton, east London, and married in 1973.
Following her marriage, Libby wound down her professional photography career. In later years, she took Open University courses in geology and science, and became an expert on Arnold Bennett’s novels.
After Tony’s death in 2008, she had “Stop! Do not resuscitate, living will extant” tattooed on her chest. Her diagnosis with end-stage idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2017 did not dim her sense of humour, her curiosity about the world or her ability to travel it in her imagination. Shetland was her last great fascination. Though she knew she would never visit, she fell asleep every night listening to Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham’s song By Dundas Loch.
“Mine has been a good life measured out in dogs,” she wrote in her memoir, self-published in 2019. Her last, Pip, lives with her stepson, Andrew, and his wife, Laura.
Andrew and her brother, Billy, survive her.
