Ben Martin, photographer who captured the 1960s . By Sam Roberts New
York Times . Ben Martin, who as a Time magazine senior photographer
immortalized Richard M. Nixon's haggard 5 o'clock shadow, the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. s march to Montgomery, Ala., and John F.
Kennedy's grieving widow and children - evocative images that defined
the 1960s - died on Feb. 10 at his home in Salisbury, N.C. He was 86.
The cause was complications of pulmonary fibrosis, said his former wife
and publishing partner, author and actress Kathryn Leigh Scott. Mr.
Martin's fascination with photography began when he was 8 and his
father gave him a UniveX miniature box camera. By 15, he was working
for The Salisbury Post, in the city where he grew up. And by 17, he had
become the youngest member of the National Press Photographers
Association. Time hired him in 1957, when he was barely 27, making him
one of its first full-time staff photographers. He worked for Time,
Life magazine, and most of their parent company's other publications.
He photographed Kennedy's funeral in 1963, an expedition to the North
Pole, and commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the D-Day landing
in Normandy and the 40th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. He took the pictures for the 1966 Time cover article "London:
The Swinging City. Nixon claimed that Mr. Martin's photograph of him
looking ashen in a 1960 presidential campaign debate with Kennedy cost
him the election, said Cheryl Crooks, a former Time colleague. "Ben was
only one of two press photographers permitted on the set during that
debate," she wrote on her blog, Photo Prose, in November 2013 on the
50th anniversary of the assassination. "His photo showed Nixon with
sweat beaded up on his forehead, his tired eyes and slightly disheveled
look. Nixon, Ben remembers, 'arrived late to the studio, refused
makeup, refused to put on a clean shirt and all that. Of course, Jack
had been there since 4 p.m. and the debate didn't start until 7.'
"Nixon hated that image," Crooks wrote, "and for years after
deliberately turned away from Ben whenever he spotted the Time
cameraman trying to photograph him. (They reconciled after Mr. Martin
took a portrait in 1985 that became one of the former president's
favorites.) In 1965, Mr. Martin nimbly walked backward facing King for
much of the protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Scott quoted
John Doar, the assistant US attorney general who was monitoring the
march, as saying that Martin was "the best shield Dr. King could have.
Mr. Martin retired from Time-Life in 1989 and later worked for
corporate clients. He founded Pomegranate Press with Scott. He also
wrote and illustrated the 1978 book "Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime.
Benjamin Rush Martin III was born on Sept. 16, 1930, in Salisbury. His
father worked for a newspaper and was later a lawyer and a judge. His
mother, the former Margaret Elizabeth Fulk, was a bank clerk. He leaves
no immediate family members. Mr. Martin graduated with a journalism
degree from Ohio University in Athens. His photo essay in The Columbus
Dispatch about a traveling preacher caught the eye of a Life magazine
picture editor, who offered him a job, but the position was eliminated
a week before he arrived in New York. Instead, he accepted a position
as a copy boy at Time. Never forsaking his Leica, he also took
freelance picture assignments for the magazine, which had taken on its
first salaried photographer, Walter E. Bennett, only in 1952.
