Charles Martin captures and compiles ideas about people and cities. He creates series of photographs that then become books, and he also captures other artists in films about their work.

Charles most often exhibits his photography at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC. He said about the recent show there Metropolis: “the views in Metropolis, as in Ferryboat, an earlier exhibition, are less a document than an evocation, an essay, a “think piece” about the city, but not enclosed by it, and fascinated by many elements.  Multiple activity, sometimes subterranean, identifies cities and the people who reside and work in them.” (from JuneKelly gallery.com)

Martin is currently organizing two books: Optical Thinking and Path Brazil, respectively, a comprehensive look at his photography production; and images made through many visits to Brazil. He has already done Because of Algiers (a full monograph), and Ferryboat and Home and Away (two smaller booklets, the latter accompanying an exhibition and series of talks that he organized at Queens College-City University of New York). He has also written a series of essays, Caption to the Visual–some of it published in academic journals–on relationships of words and the visual.

The films he has made on artists include Ed Clark: a Brush with Success; Hats by Bunn; Hewitt Collection of African-American Art; and three on Warren Smith (percussionist and composer); and one on Lisa Mackie.

Art Work pictured: Urban Anthill, NYC, 2019 from the exhibition invite for “Metropolis” at the June Kelly Gallery (Sept-Oct, 2022)

About Charles Martin

Charles Martin studied photography at the Yale School of Art with Thomas Roma and JoAnn Walters.  He has been showing extensively in both solo and group exhibitions since the mid-1980s, and throughout the United States, Europe, and especially Brazil.  His works can be found in public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, Museum of the City of New York, Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University, KeySpan (Brooklyn Union Gas), Pfizer Incorporated, New York, Mott-Warsh Art Collection, Flint MI, Walter Heun Collection, and Marriott Hotel, just to name a few.

Martin has also been teaching Comparative Literature at Queens College for more than 20 years, with an interest in autobiography; pairings of photography and text; black writers from around the world; and film. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he received a master’s degree and a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese.  He lives and works in New York.