Martha Cooper

Encouraged by her father, who owned a camera store, Martha Cooper (b. 1943, Baltimore) took up photography at a young age. In 1979, while a staff photographer at the New York Post, she had a chance encounter with a neighborhood boy who introduced her to the graffiti writer DONDI. Cooper had long been drawn to photographing children at play, and graffiti seemed a logical extension of this theme. She went on to document many of graffiti’s most iconic works and their creators, often caught “in the act”; the social aspect of her images reveals her background in anthropology as well as art. Cooper’s 1984 book, Subway Art, coauthored with photographer Henry Chalfant, helped the graffiti movement spread throughout the world, and Hip Hop Files, published in 2004, portrays the exploding break dancing movement of the early 1980s. Cooper continues to document art on the streets—among her recent books are Going Postal and Name Tagging, which focus on sticker street art—and her body of work is one of the most significant of its kind.


Art in the Streets, the first major historical exhibition of graffiti and street art organized by an American museum, surveys the origins and history of the movement in the United States and traces its influence as it spread around the world. Privacy Policy