Press Photographer

Marty Hyman is skinny and undersized but a tough member of a tough trade--a press photographer. Last week Artist Marty Hyman was given a one-man show by Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, oldest art organization in the U.S.

Metropolitan press photographers are the proverbial tough guys of U.S. journalism. They earn a thick-skinned living shooting pictures of gang fights, strikes, accidents and fires, are popularly supposed to take everything from illegal entry to abduction as part of the day's work. For eleven years, Marty Hyman has been rushing around Republican Philadelphia, snapping news shots for Dave Stern's brawling, loudly Democratic Philadelphia Record.

But in his more reflective moments Marty Hyman has always had a weakness for art. Sent to cover some grimy accident-ward tragedy, he would come back to the Record with unnewsworthy details--the faces of a helpless old man and a crippled child, a seamy portrait of an old flower vendor. Marty Hyman's touching, tear-jerking character studies appealed to Record readers.

The Philadelphians who went to Marty's show this week recognized many a familiar item from the Record: the famous Flower Vendor, a deftly composed photograph of a circus elephant rampant on a field of water buckets, sharply etched pictures of choir boys, burlesque clowns, oyster fishermen, ballplayers, bums, nuns and children. Last week, before the show opened, Photographer Hyman was in Bethlehem, Pa. being pelted with coal and chased by strikers who didn't want to be photographed. But for the opening he put on his best suit, later guest-of-honored at a celebrity-thronged party at the Record offices. Said he: "It's the greatest thing that can ever happen to me."

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