To the supplicants who thronged his counter, and the others who placed frantic calls from obscure corners of the world at obscure hours of the night, Mr. Forscher was equal parts detective, diagnostician, conjurer and psychotherapist. Many photographers referred to him as the Savior. The more concision-minded simply called him God.  When the shop went out of business in 2001 (Mr. Forscher had sold it to colleagues when he retired in 1987), the photographic community heaved a collective shudder of panic.  Whether one’s camera had plunged into the sea, fallen from a skyscraper, been smashed in a riot or been otherwise sorely treated, Mr. Forscher could almost always find a solution. He knew, for instance, when to give a camera a bath (after an unplanned ocean dip, to flush out the saltwater), when to take it to the gas station (after the curative freshwater bath, to blow out the residue with the compressed-air hose), and when to bake it in the oven (after returning from the gas station, to dry out any lingering moisture).  Presiding over a staff of specialists — Nikon men, Leica men, Hasselblad men, movie-camera men — Mr. Forscher, in his red apron, was a learned generalist. An accomplished inventor, he adapted equipment so his clients could capture better pictures atop tall buildings, beneath the sea, on the battlefield and inside the human body.  His best-known invention, patented in 1982, was the Pro-Back, a Polaroid attachment for a 35-millimeter camera that gave photographers an immediate proof print, letting them test a shot without having to wait for the film to be developed. Mr. Forscher also created an early compact motor drive for still cameras.  Martin Hubert Forscher was born in Manhattan on Nov. 25, 1921. His father, a furrier and gambler, ran off with his bookkeeper when Marty was about 6, leaving his mother to weather the Depression by selling lingerie door to door in financial district offices.  After graduating from Stuyvesant High School, Marty entered the City College of New York intending to become a doctor, but left before graduating to help support his mother. He found a job as an errand boy for a downtown camera shop and before long was fixing cameras.  In World War II, Mr. Forscher worked in Washington as a repairman for the Navy photographic unit run by the eminent photographer Edward Steichen. After the war, he opened Professional Camera Repair Service. Originally at 480 Lexington Avenue in Midtown, the shop was located for many years afterward at 37 West 47th Street.  In the early 1960s, Mr. Forscher began begging discarded cameras from magazines, fixing them and sending them South. There, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee used them to document the civil rights movement in images published in newspapers and magazines around the world. Some were of signal events, like Bloody Sunday — March 7, 1965 — when state troopers beat black marchers in Selma, Ala. Others captured small daily victories, like a black child learning to read at a Mississippi Freedom School.  When the cameras were dashed to the ground or drenched by police fire hoses, Mr. Forscher repaired them and sent them back again.  Besides his wife, the former Marian Hamilton, whom he married in 1945, Mr. Forscher is survived by two sons, Paul and Gregg, and a grandchild.  Since 1990, the Marty Forscher Fellowship has been awarded to students and young professionals specializing in humanistic documentary photography. The fellowship is given annually by Photo District News, a trade publication, and Parsons the New School for Design.  In reminiscences on the Web last week, clients also paid tribute to Mr. Forscher’s Holmesian deductive abilities. Some years ago, as recounted in a posting to The Online Photographer, a photo-news site, a man walked into Mr. Forscher’s shop wearing a Pentax MX and a pained look.  “Without batting an eye,” the posting continued, “this impish, graying, stoop-shouldered guy looks at my face, looks at the camera and says: ‘Lemme guess. The diodes flicker in the finder and jump all over the place when you meter.’ ”  Mr. Forscher was spot-on, and there was a reason. A few days before, he had seen another customer with the same camera, the same problem and precisely the same facial expression.  A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2009, on Page A34 of the New York edition with the headline: Marty Forscher, 87, Dies; Tended Cameras and Owners. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Forscher’s intimate knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the camera made him for decades the most sought-after camera repairman in the country.