Ben Martin, TIME's first New York Bureau staff photographer, covered wars, fashion, politics, arts, business and sports for TIME, Life, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated for thirty-three years.
He walked backwards in front of Martin Luther King for most of the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March, causing Chief U.S. Marshall, John Doar, to comment that “Martin was the best shield Dr. King could have, because he was always in front of [the black leader] photographing his every move.”
Despite having taken the "infamous" sweaty upper lip and five-o'clock shadow photograph of Richard Nixon during the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates in 1960 (a photograph Nixon claimed cost him the election and led to Martin being ostracized by him), many year later, Nixon asked that, “we let bygones be bygones" and commissioned him to photograph his official post-presidential portrait.
He was as lead photographer on TIME’s now famous “Swinging London” cover story that Hugh Hefner, founder and editor of PLAYBOY, called “pivotal” in defining the sensual, sexy “swinging sixties.”
He photographed major cover essays on the 25th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy and 40th anniversaries of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, the Japanese "Zero" pilot, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Mozambique civil war from both the rebel and Portuguese sides, East African Safaris and an arctic expedition to the North Pole. His three-day non-stop coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral led to a LIFE magazine cover, and his coverage of the first traveling pontiff, Pope Paul’s trip to the Holy Land was a cover feature in TIME.
