Photographer Frank Martin, who died at the age of 89, was on the Guardian staff from 1964 to 1997, creating a wide range of work that covered news, arts, fashion, politics and international events.
During his career on paper, he portrayed most of his notable contemporaries. These include, among hundreds of others, young Judi Dench at home and Mark Rylance at rehearsal; artists Andy Warhol and David Hockney; Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign. Fidel Castro and Twiggy are captured. Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. novelists Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer; The Rolling Stones in an early television appearance in 1964; Giant pandas Chia Xia and Cheng Qing met at the London Zoo after a failed mating trip to Washington.
Frank was in Aberfan for the disaster in 1966; in Belfast during the Troubles, when he was "disturbed" by rioters; He traveled to India to film Rajiv Gandhi's funeral in 1991, but ended up being sent to cover floods in Bangladesh, where he snapped a hugely touching photo of a young boy holding his dying infant brother. In 1967 he had witnessed the Torrey Canyon oil disaster off the southwest coast of Britain and wrote about the experience.
The diversity of his subjects was astounding. He worked with only two cameras (Pentax, and more recently Nikons), a pair of lenses and a flash gun. The flash gun was usually left in his nifty leather camera bag - and "available light" was the preferred lighting for his atmospheric portraits.
One Sunday in June 1989, Frank was in the Guardian's office as a duty photographer. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, had died the night before. It is decided that Frank will try to get to the funeral in Tehran.
By maxing his credit card and breaking into the editor's safe, an airline ticket was purchased and he was on his way. He didn't need to go home. He always carried his passport. To actually get to the funeral, along with millions of mourners, she required Frank to draw on all his experience, resilience, and courage. He ended up at the grave that the crowd nearly carried, but he took some career-defining photos and was on a plane back to London that night.
In the '70s and '80s, Frank was one of the broadest international photographers who followed the twice-yearly cycle of ready-to-wear from Milan to Paris to New York to London. Brenda Pollan, the Guardian’s fashion editor at the time (and later women’s editor) said: “Frank’s theme was as a wildlife photographer and he was very good not only because of his expert eye for composition but because he had the patience to wait quietly for the animal to move into the fire. This was It's exactly what it takes to be catwalk photography - and he's been pretty good at that, too."
He was hugely admired across the fashion industry and was often commissioned by designers to moonlight and take publicity photos. When a newspaper photographer trained not just to get the picture but to move it to the darkroom and the paper before the deadline, he was fast. “In a profession where one supermodel shot can take an entire boring day, Frank got the perfect photo in minutes,” Pollan said.
Contribute more than just photos to the Guardian. He was that rare among photographers - he could write. For several years, in addition to photographing fashion, Frank wrote about it as well. From Milan in 1979 he said: "The modern woman of this coming fall...will likely be a broad-shouldered, spiky-heeled superwoman with perhaps a trilby trimmed edge and a striped suit...the inevitable square, padded shoulders, with tops and puffs. And wings. And some o'mutton leg sleeves by Walter Albini; but you don't have to look like Al Capone on his wedding day. The designs balance flared shirts with sweeping neck-to-hem stripes, filled with uncomfortable sleeves and distinct flair." All of his fashion articles are illustrated with his own photos.
Frank was born in West Ham, East London. His father, Frederick, was a carpenter turned bus driver, and his mother, Rose (née Higgs) worked in a garden shop. He attended Bell Modern School at Ilford before performing his national service in the RAF's Photographic Reconnaissance Unit at Benson in Oxfordshire, where he also met his future wife Eileen Williams; They married in 1953. Like many other photographers of his generation, he was bitten by a photo bug during his tenure in the RAF.
After his layoff, he worked as a "darkroom kid" with the Fleet Street News Agency, before taking a job with the Bernson International Press Service (BIPS). His successful apprenticeship at BIPS doing all kinds of assignments for national magazines and newspapers led to his job at Guardian's London office in 1964.
In the early days there he also wrote articles for the British Journal of Photography, including The Spread of Life as a Photojournalist on London's Coldest Streets, Threshold Number 10, and an interview with the leading sports photographer at the time, Ed Lacey. In 1977 he was named Men's Fashion Writer of the Year.
Frank was a respected photographer among his peers, described by Pollan as "a long, quiet presence at the heart of the mob hysteria" that often prevailed at international fashion shows. “We traveled together for half a decade,” she recalls, muttering to each other that this fashion circus wasn't really a way for adults to make a living. I'd drag it to fashion parties and designer dinners where you didn't get a bite before midnight. His sweet, often-repeated reproach, "That's another wonderful mess you got me, Polan," still rings in my ear every time the situation becomes sticky. "
After retiring in 1997, Frank returned to his favorite subject, wildlife, and continued to build a large archive. Eileen, who was a craft teacher, died in 2012; Frank is survived by his daughter Anne.
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