b. 16 April 1864; d. 7 July 1944
Paul Martin was born in Alcase-Lorraine, but in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune his family fled to England when he was a child.
His first experiments in photography started when he was ten years old, but he was nineteen before he started taking photography seriously. In 1892 he purchased an unusual camera called the "Facile", a large box that looked like a brown paper parcel which was held under the arm, and which gave him the opportunity to take some excellent candid photographs of scenes in London. He is particularly remembered for his striking pictures depicting London by night, taken in 1895-6. This series, known as "London by Gaslight" earned him the Royal Photographic Society medal. Because the pictures are candid, Martin's photographs have an honest, unpretentious style.
Though some members of the photographic world looked down on this type of work, he was unperturbed, and his work gives us an insight into life in London which few photographs of the time come anywhere near to doing.
Writing later about these times, Martin felt that there was far too lofty and rigid an idea as to what constituted "good" photography: "....two principal exhibition societies, representing the official photographic sentiment of the day, were not encouraging towards the type of subject which I was then taking. There was more outlet in the suburban clubs, but even there many members regarded some of my studies as rather infra dig or even shocking. They felt that a plate demanded a noble and dignified subject, a cathedral or mountain."
He was encouraged in his work by George Davidson, a fellow member of his local photographic society and an influential contemporary. He also became a member of the Linked Ring.
Martin would not have called himself a documentary photographer; his interest was simply to portray human beings candidly, without people posing.
© Robert Leggat, 1999.