900
dubbed “living statues”—were the hits of many lantern
slide evening presentations and gained Martin important
notices and awards at the time. He would amplify the
work to more expansive environments when he also
carried the hidden camera on vacations to other Brit-
ish locales such as the port of Whitby, the beaches of
Yarmouth, and even on Swiss vacations.
The other innovative pioneering work for which he
became famous derived from his continuing fascination
with the aesthetic applications of newer technological
innovations. Martin experimented with a variety of
nature phenomena—waves at sea, dawns and sunsets,
and long exposures—before he hit upon his most re-
sounding work: night photography. Finding new ways to
handle such traditional nighttime problems as halation,
exposures and incidental light, the photographer began
in 1895–96 to produce elegant and complex images
throughout the rain-covered, foggy streets of an urban
London that was itself in the days in which gas lighting
was being transformed by electricity. Martin’s “London
by Gaslight” won him the widest fame of all, as well
as the gold medal of the 1996 R.P.S. annual exhibition
and the notice of the established Pictorialists of the day.
No less a fi gure than George Davison offered Martin
a position with the rapidly growing Eastman Kodak
Company in 1898.
By the century’s end, however, Martin made a de-
liberate professional choice himself. In 1899, he sensed
the end of his profession of wood-engraving in an era
in which press illustrations were being transformed by
photomechanical reproductions of the photographic
image itself. Together with Henry Gordon Dorrett he
established a professional fi rm—variously known as
Dorrett & Martin or as Athol Studios—that featured
everything from freelance press photography to com-
mercial processing and even specialized applications for
portraiture such as photo-buttons and other miniature
novelties. Although the enterprise was apparently highly
successful from a commercial perspective, it effectively
ended all of Martin’s serious photography. Although
he never abandoned making his own photographs—his
later work includes pictures of the street and of sporting
events as well as more holiday travels—he maintained
his time and focus upon running the business.
At the end of 1926 Dorrett & Martin closed their
doors. In old age Martin was eventually rediscovered
by the camera clubs—which engaged him to give en-
tertaining lectures based upon his Victorian era photo-
graphs—and numerous publishers which featured his
work and/or reminiscences in newspapers, magazines
and books of the day. In 1939 (photography’s centen-
nial year) he was encouraged and assisted by C.H.
Gibbs-Smith, Research Fellow at the Science Museum,
to publish a small autobiography, Victorian Snapshots,
which would introduce his innovative “amateur” work
to an entirely new generation of photographers. He lived
in retirement with his two sons and, perhaps ironically
re-haunted by the wars of his youth, passed away from
natural causes during the London Blitz on the evening
of July 7, 1944.
Martin’s original prints are found in many important
collections around the world. The main bulk of his
amateur imagery—prints, negatives, lantern slides and
an early album—form an important part of the Gern-
sheim Collection at The University of Texas at Austin.
His manuscript diary and albums of wood engravings
and other prints are in the possession of the Fine Arts
Library, University of New Mexico General Library,
Albuquerque. A large collection of imagery collected
by the Royal Photographic Society, is now housed in the
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television
in Bradford.
Roy FlukingerBiography
Paul Martin was born in rural France in 1864, and
moved with his family to Paris in 1869, in time to sur-
vive the dangers of both the Franco-Prussian War and
the Paris Commune in the following years. The family
then moved to London, which would become Paul’s
adopted home for the remainder of his life. Combining
a talent for drawing together with top grades in London
and Parisian schools, he apprenticed himself to a Fleet
Street engraving fi rm in 1880. His childhood fascina-
tion with the visual world eventually led him to become
interested in amateur photography and to purchase his
fi rst dry-plate camera in 1884. Throughout the 1880s
Martin joined photographic societies, read all he could
about the technology and art of the medium, and honed
his own skills on holidays and street scenes. The 1890s
would mark his mature amateur period, during which he
experimented with various light effects and documen-
tary imagery—as well as doing revolutionary work in
the areas of night photography and candid street images
(made with a concealed plate camera called the Facile).
During this same decade, he won both a certain fame
and many awards from various amateur competitions
throughout a number of London salons and camera
clubs. Most critically of all, he came to recognize that his
own profession of wood engraving was being replaced
by photography and the increased use of such images in
the popular photomechanical press of the day. In 1899 he
made the jump, opening a fi rm in partnership with Henry
G. Dorrett that featured everything from freelance press
photography to commercial processing and special-
ized applications for portraiture such as photo-buttons.
Although he never lost his aesthetic eye and always
continued to experiment with the latest technological
innovations, the management of his business cut deeply