Martin Zell does not use the “R” word, “I don’t say I’m retired,” he said. “I’ve just stopped working.”
It is a distinction he makes with a smile, but also with a certain seriousness. Because if retirement suggests stepping away from the world, Zell has done almost the opposite. Since moving to the Eastern Shore with his wife, Linda, he has served on boards, taught iPhone photography, managed photo shows, volunteered with local organizations, and spent months at a time traveling through Africa, Asia, Central, and South America.
And everywhere he goes, he takes pictures.
Not the kind that usually ends up enlarged over a sofa. Not sunsets, sailboats, or polished landscapes, though he can certainly appreciate those. Zell’s photographs are often quieter than that: faces, villages, people working, waiting, carrying water, holding children, selling chickens, looking directly at him or just past him. The kinds of images that make you stop and wonder who the person was before the frame, and what happened after.“I like to let the people tell their story,” Zell said.
That instinct goes back a long way.
Zell was 27 and working at Iowa Public Television when he remembers thinking, “This may be the best job I’ve ever had.”
It was a different time in public television. Funding was available, the state supported the network, and cable had not yet changed everything. For Zell, who had started as a camera operator and eventually became a senior producer. “Even the most simplest of things can be very dramatic,” he said.
His first assignment, he remembered, was wheelchair basketball. It could have been covered simply as a sports story. But Zell immediately found himself looking beyond the game.
“They’re very impressive sinking baskets,” he said. “But who were these people? They have a story to tell.”
That question—who are these people?—has followed him through much of his life’s work. It was there in the documentaries he produced for public television, including “Don’t Forget the Khmer,” which focused on Cambodian refugees through the eyes of an Iowa medical team. At first, Zell wasn’t sure where the center of the story was.
“I remember feeling like, what the heck can this show be about?” he said. “It’s a political story. But how much can you tell that way?”
Then he watched the Iowa team experience the refugee camps, the makeshift tents, the children, the families, and the gratitude of people living with almost nothing. “I remember thinking: ‘that’s the show,’” he said.
Zell was there long enough to feel it himself. He remembers one woman handing him a baby.
“I just melted,” he said. “I thought of my kids who were young back then. I got to see how appreciative these people were and how sweet they were.”
A Des Moines Tribune feature once described him as “a humanist with great understanding for people.” Asked whether he recognizes himself in that description, Zell does, though somewhat reluctantly. “I’m really quite modest,” he said.
That humanist quality would carry into the next stages of his career. After leaving Iowa Public Television, Zell moved to Washington, D.C., and started Zell Productions International, an award-winning film and video production company. Later, as funding for that kind of work became harder to secure, he shifted again, this time into special event production with Hargrove, Inc., where he worked on major national events, including President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the NATO Conference in Chicago, and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.
At first glance, it sounds like a completely different world from what he had been doing, but Zell doesn’t see it that way. In film, he said, you are telling a story over half an hour or an hour. In major event production, the story might stretch over four or five days. But the bones are similar: pacing, transitions, message, audience, timing. “It’s still all about keeping your audience interested,” he said.
The work also pushed him into areas that had not been his natural home. “I’m not an engineer, and I never will be,” he said. But he learned rigging, staging, and all the practical language of large theatrical production. He adapted because he had to.
When he and Linda eventually moved to the Shore, Zell did not imagine himself sitting still. “We’ve got to do something,” he said. “Keep moving.”
So he did. He became involved with the Chesapeake Film Festival, eventually serving as president from 2021 to 2024. He volunteered with Phillips Wharf Environmental Center, taught “iPhone Photo Magic” through Chesapeake Forum, managed the annual photo show for the St. Michaels Art League, and now serves as a docent at the Tilghman Watermen’s Museum.
“I love history,” he said. “There are such great human stories in history, and I love the history of the area that I’ve adopted here.” He has particular appreciation for the watermen and “generations of survival here,” he said. “That’s been tough.”
But the camera lens has always been his constant.
Zell traces his personal photography through all the ways pictures have changed: slides, prints, carousel boxes, albums, early digital cameras, and finally the iPhone. He had a period, he said, when he felt lost. “I didn’t know what camera to use,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to adapt to the new technology.”
Then the iPhone camera improved. And improved again. “With each upgrade, the camera gets better,” he said.
He edits simply, often within the phone itself, sometimes using Snapseed, a free editing app. He is not trying to make the images fancy. He is trying to make them feel like what he saw.“When I’m there, what I’m seeing is making an impression,” he said. “I want to create the experience as best as I can in the photo.”
Recreating an experience is something that was born of his travels, long before the iPhone was even invented.
At 22, living in Des Moines, he put National Geographic maps on his wall and traced a route from Europe to India. It would later be known as the hippie trail, though he says it did not have that name at the time. He traveled overland for a year, using local transportation, moving through countries and cultures that left a permanent mark.
“I was drawn into making that journey,” he said.
He remembers buses stopping so Muslim passengers could pray. He remembers Afghanistan and “the proud Afghani people.” He remembers one man looking at him as if to say, what are you doing here? “It affected me, I looked at him,” Zell said, “and I just fell in love with this man.”
That early trip never left him. Life, work, and raising children paused the longer journeys for a while, though he and his family still traveled. But after he “stopped working” in 2013, he and Linda began taking extended winter trips. Their first trip lasted four months and took them through five countries in Southeast Asia.
Four months, they decided, was a little long.
So they adjusted to three.
Since then, they have traveled for months at a time through Senegal, India, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and many other places. Zell keeps albums for every stop.
His Instagram account, @martin_zman, is where many of those images now live. His description on the page is simple: “The travels of a curious photographer, shaped by the world and anchored in the Chesapeake Bay, USA.”
That may be true. But it also undersells the work. Zell’s photographs are not travel trophies. They are not proof that he has been somewhere. They feel more like evidence that he was paying attention.
If you look through those albums, you’ll notice that not all of the people are smiling. “I wish that most of the time they wouldn’t,” he said. A smile, he feels, can flatten a picture, turning a person into a pose. Zell seems more interested in the unguarded second—the sideways glance, the stillness, the face that is not performing for the camera.
Some images are busy, full of movement and context. Others are spare and reflective. Asked whether his work has grown quieter over time, Zell considered the word. Maybe quieter in composition. Maybe more reflective. Maybe simply another way of seeing.
What is clear is that the same question that shaped his first television assignment still shapes the work now.
Who were these people?
There is a direct line from wheelchair basketball in Iowa to Cambodian refugee camps to a woman carrying water in Sri Lanka. From PBS documentaries to presidential inaugurations to a man anchored in the Chesapeake Bay, USA, scrolling through images on his phone, looking for the ones that still speak.
“These days I’m perfectly happy being but a small schmear,” Zell wrote recently, “and not the big cheese.”
Maybe. But even as a small schmear, Martin Zell is still doing what he has always done: watching closely, listening first, and trusting people to tell their own stories.
