As a child in Texas, Hank O’Neal first experienced photography when he watched his father print his World War II photographs and family portraits in a kitchen darkroom. A few years later, in 1952, he won a Brownie Hawkeye in a drawing at a small grocery store and began taking and processing his own pictures. Child in Spacesuit, 1953, is a product of those times.

Twenty years later, in 1973, O’Neal had a better camera, his first book, The Eddie Condon Scrapbook of Jazz, was published, and he had his first modest photography show, Winona, Texas, at The Open Mind Gallery, an appropriately modest establishment in the soon to blossom Soho district of New York City. By then, photography had become a serious avocation, and during that period O’Neal formed lasting friendships and working relationships with such noted photographers as Berenice Abbott, Andre Kertesz, all the living Farm Security Administration photographers and many others. Additionally, he came to know many dealers, critics, and curators interested in the art of photography, particularly Lee Witkin and those associated with his gallery, as well as Harry Lunn. His relationship with The Witkin Gallery continued until it ceased operation in 1999, and with Harry Lunn until his death in 1998.  More recently he has been associated with Howard Greenberg.

In 1972, O’Neal met Berenice Abbott and began a working relationship with her that lasted nineteen years. It was Abbott who convinced him of the merits of a large format view camera, suggesting that if he’d buy one, she’d teach him how to work it. He did and she did, in an abbreviated thirty-minute session. About the same time, Bert Stern suggested there was equal merit in medium format cameras and gave O’Neal a spare Rolleiflex to prove the point. No lesson was involved.

Now, equipped with a Leica, Nikon, Rolleiflex, and Deardorff, O’Neal began to take serious photographs. His visual boundary was provided by a conversation with John Vachon, who told him, "I knew I would only photograph what pleased or astonished my eye, and in the way I wanted to see it," and this sounded like a fine philosophy. Abbott provided the intellectual boundary, when she admonished O’Neal, saying, "Don’t take photographs willy-nilly, you have to have a project."

Hank O'Neal and Qi, 2003 by Ian Clifford