Martin Dain

His photographs are held in collections at the University of Mississippi and the University of Texas at Austin.

Dain was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 20, 1924, the son of Max Mendel Dain, a pharmacist, and Beatrice Trilling Dain. Both of his parents were of Russian-Jewish heritage. Dain’s father Max was an amateur photographer and Dain would start shooting with his father's Rolleicord camera. Dain attended high school at the Boston Latin School. He enlisted in the military in 1943, where he served as a communications specialist in the Signal Corps during World War II. After leaving the army in 1946, Dain attended the University of Miami where he studied history and government. After graduation, he relocated to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill.

In Paris, Dain landed a job with the Pictorial Service, where he processed pictures for some of Europe’s leading photographers. This was also the time when Dain transitioned from shooting with a Rolleicord camera to 35mm cameras. On returning to the United States in 1953, Dain settled in New York City, where he became a freelance photographer. His photographs were featured in exhibitions and published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Time magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Esquire, and Popular Photography's Photography Annual, which featured the year’s best photographs. Dain photographed a wide range of subjects including the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, the 1955 US Equestrian Team, Native Americans and the construction of the Lincoln Tunnel. He photographed numerous celebrities and politicians, including Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona and classical composers and musicians such as Carlos Chavez, Aaron Copland, Andres Segovia, Igor Stravinsky, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. His interest in sports cars culminated in the book A Guide to American Sports Car Racing in 1960, which included photographs from the 1958 Little Le Mans endurance race at Lime Rock and the 1958 Watkins Glen Grand Prix. In the early 1960s, Dain embarked on a project to capture the world of writer William Faulkner. Dain made several trips to Oxford, Mississippi, the first in August 1961, where he made contact with several of Faulkner's friends and acquaintances, including J. R. Cofield, Jim Silver, and Mac Reed. Later, he met Faulkner’s step-granddaughter, Victoria Fielden. Eventually, Dain was able to meet and photograph the writer at home. During Dain's final visit to Oxford, in 1962, he attended and photographed Faulkner's funeral. Select photographs from this project were published in the books Faulkner's County: Yoknapatawpha in 1964, and Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain in 1997. Dain's photographs of Oxford, Mississippi are held in the Martin J. Dain Collection at the University of Mississippi. Similarly, over 500 of Dain's prints, which were previously part of the Magnum Photos press prints collection, are held in a collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center.

Dain settled in Carmel Valley, California in 1971 where he opened a shop, selling Inuit and Native American artwork and sculptures. Dain died on February 16, 2000 in Carmel Valley, California. He was 75.