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Umaxxi Content
Welcome!
Fall 2024, I spend in residency, awarded a Fellowship at The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, at work on “Optical Thinking,” a book of photography and text.
My film, Ed Clark: A Brush with Success (2006), I am happy to say, was on view as part of the exhibition, “Ed Clark,” at Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2024).
Spend some time here in the Umaxxi site sections of photos, related text and writing, and take the link to the Umaxxi video channel.
To explore the photos, click above on "Gallery" at the top of the site’s opening page. That takes you to “A first glance,” whose photos are taken from the several series found in the sections that follow. The last section, "Regarding the photographs," includes some annotation.
Instituto Anchieta Grajaú, São Paulo, Brazil
African Burial Ground National Memorial, New York, NY
Reflections
Cloud Mania
Night
Niemeyer
The Oculus
Ibeji – Twin Towers
Ferryboat
Making Carnival
Path Brazil
Ed Clark
Emanoel Araújo
Storied People
Speak Up
Reform of the Pinacoteca, São Paulo
Still Life
"Regarding the photographs"
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The section Foolish Pleasure offers poems and more.
At Hello! — below the page you are now reading — there is a brief bio and a short comment about photography. Next to them, beneath “More Portfolios,” is a link — “A click to more work” — to further groups of photographs that are on the Social Documentary Network website.
At the bottom of these pages you are now reading, as well as here, there is a link to the Umaxxi video channel.
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Though each of us is unique, many a name is not. Multitudes of moms and dads have made the same choice, so there is no shortage of guys with the name, Charles Martin. “Umaxxi” is my attempt at creating a one-of-a-kind moniker to make it easier to identify things on-line by the one Charles Martin who is me.
If you google Umaxxi, you’ll be taken to work of mine.
Enjoy looking!
—Charles Martin
Hello!
Photo sight
More Portfolios
More Portfolios
Henri Cartier-Bresson often referred to geometry, so evident in his photos, as essential to visual art. People delight in such form. Occasionally, a dream or a nightmare is concocted from concrete, glass, metal, water, earth, sky and light. Alfred Stieglitz, photographer and advocate of art, was famously appalled at the idea that the power of his photography came from its subject matter. Stieglitz wanted to show that photography could be abstract and more or less free of reference. Reformulated, the thought might be that sight, itself, can ultimately be the primary subject.
—Charles Martin
Bio
More Portfolios
Bio
CHARLES MARTIN is a photographer, filmmaker, writer and past chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College-City University of New York. Group photo shows include the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and a MoMA travelling show to Spain, Italy and Ireland; Museum of the City of São Paulo (Brazil), Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, Leica Gallery (NY) and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Solo exhibitions include Museu Histórico e Artístico do Maranhão (São Luís do Maranhão, Brazil), the Musée Public National d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Algiers, Algeria), Musée de la Halle St. Pierre (Paris), and Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island, NY. Martin exhibits frequently in New York where, at June Kelly Gallery, he has had eight solo shows. In Brazil he has exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Cuiabá. Groups of his photography are on-line at Social Documentary Network website and he has been interviewed on the Cinque Artists Talk Program of the Romare Bearden Foundation. In the Porto Alegre, Brazil, weekly on-line magazine, Parêntese, his photography has featured several times, as well as an essay on Albert Camus’s La Peste, and an interview touching photography and literature, including his introduction, “Uma Rara Visão Livre,” to the 1988 edition of the novel Úrsula, by Maria Firmina dos Reis, the once overlooked but ground-breaking, importantly innovative early black novelist of Brazil. The Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Maranhão has honored him with nomination and election to Sócio Correspondente.
Monographs include Because of Algiers (2013) and Ferryboat (2000).
Martin was a writer for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the New London Day, editor of The Scene (newsletter of the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Center), and published book reviews in the New York Times. He has contributed articles—some from his series, Caption to the Visual—and poetry and photography to various journals—both print and on-line.
At Yale University Martin received a B.A. in English (1974), did graduate study in Afro-American Studies (1982-1984), and received the Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese (1988). He is fluent in Portuguese and French, and has been Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock.