Was he a cosmopolitan Life Magazine photographer, passing through the city during world travels? Did he work full time for the mayor’s office or a professional photography studio downtown?
Ted Martin laughs at the thought. His father James Martin — our man of mystery — was a full-time schoolteacher and administrator, and very much an amateur photographer.
“He loved San Francisco. He lived here his entire life, all 90 years,” Ted Martin said on Monday. “He was a big sports fan: Giants, Warriors, 49ers. He worked hard. He did his day job and then did night school and other things for extra money.”
A photographer whose lost Kodachrome slides taken in San Francisco started a mystery is photographed at the Japanese Tea Garden on March 30, 1966.
Bob Campbell/The Chronicle 1966
One of those other things was photography. Martin photographed weddings and parties, and he took the faculty photos for his school’s yearbooks, often developing the images in a home darkroom. But his most ambitious work was around the rapidly changing city. He showed up at press conferences, construction sites and the mayor’s office, then turned those images into content for San Francisco Unified School District.
“He would take the pictures and then transfer them into film reels,” Ted Martin said. “They were like slideshows on movie reels, used as presentations for adult and elementary schools.”
James Martin died in 2019 at age 90, and thousands of his slides stored in three file cabinets were left on a Duncan Street curb in early 2020, as part of a purge by another son. (Ted Martin said that decision was not popular with all the other relatives.)
Donnie Weaver, an artist and preschool teacher who lived in the neighborhood, picked up one of the cabinets that day, and earlier this summer handed the 920 Kodachrome slides inside to photo collector David Gallagher, who started scanning and posting them on his SFMemory.org site. He’s still looking for the other file cabinets.
San Francisco educator and photographer James Martin poses with his camera in the late 1960s.
Provided by Ted Martin
Gallagher began recruiting other photographers and historians to help learn the identity of the photographer. A tip from Japanese Tea Garden historian Steven Pitsenbarger led to the San Francisco Chronicle archive, where we found photos taken by a Chronicle photographer that showed James Martin’s face.
Ted Martin was contacted by a friend who saw the Chronicle story on Facebook and quickly informed his family; James Martin’s wife Doris is still alive, and the couple had four children. Then he contacted Gallagher.
It was the final twist in the great archive mystery.
James Martin golfs at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco a few years before his death in 2019. Hundreds of Martin’s photographs in slide form from the 1960s were discovered abandoned in a file cabinet in the Mission District in 2020.
Provided by Ted Martin
During the sleuthing, we contacted former Chronicle photographers Gary Fong and Vince Maggiora, who believed based on Martin’s access and quality equipment that he was a full-time professional photographer.
Martin said his dad was just really good at a lot of different things.
“He was very mechanically inclined,” Ted Martin said. “He was always fixing cars, fixing the plumbing, fixing the electrical. We never knew what a mechanic was or what a carpenter was. He did all that himself.”
Reach Peter Hartlaub: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
