Martha Cooper

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Martha Cooper during the graffiti art exhibition Urban Discipline in Hamburg, 2001

Martha Cooper (* 1942 in Baltimore , Maryland ) is an American photojournalist who documented the development of New York hip-hop culture with her pictures .

biography

Martha Cooper took photos at the age of three. After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa , she joined the Peace Corps in 1963 as an English teacher in Thailand .

After two years of instruction, in 1965 she rode a motorcycle over 20,000 kilometers from Thailand to Oxford , England and began studying ethnology . She is of the opinion not to use the possibilities of the camera and is looking for a way to combine photography and anthropology (“ethnographer behind the camera”).

After employment at the Smithsonian Institute , Yale University and an internship at National Geographic , she married the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie in 1969 ; both lived in Japan until 1971 .

Martha in front of a photo installation in Berlin, 2014.

After returning to the United States, she worked as a photographer for the New York Post from 1973 . In the course of this, she met graffiti writer HE3 in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1979, who brought her into contact with the writing scene. Cooper quickly got to know other well-known sprayers like Dondi and began to systematically shoot the work of the young people.

In January 1980 Martha Cooper took the first photos of what is now known as breakdancing . The pictures are the first documents that report on breakdancing.

The book Subway Art , which she published in 1984 together with the photographer Henry Chalfant , became a milestone in writing documentation and was instrumental in spreading the phenomenon in the media in Europe .

In 2006 Cooper took part in the Outsides project , a corporate street art attack in Wuppertal , and wrote the foreword for the project documentation, which was published as a book.

In May 2018 she published the book "One Week with 1UP" with the 1UP crew. The photographer accompanied the crew for a week and documented this time in the book.

literature

  • Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper: Subway Art . 2nd Edition. Thames & Hudson Inc., New York 1984, ISBN 978-0-500-27320-3 (English, online [accessed January 4, 2014]).
  • RIP: New York Spraycan Memorials , Thames and Hudson, 1994
  • Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979–1984 , From Here to Fame, 2004
  • Street Play , From Here to Fame, 2005
  • We B * Girlz , text by Nika Kramer, Powerhouse Cultural Entertainment Books, 2005
  • Subway Art , Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant, Hamburg: Edel Edition, March 2009
  • Name Tagging , Martha Cooper, Mark Batty Publisher, July 2010
  • Zeb.Roc.Ski. (Ed.): From here to fame . Publishing 2006.
  • Martha Cooper Hip Hop Files - Photographs . 1979-1984.
  • Martha Cooper Ninja K. "One Week with 1UP" Publishing May 2018

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julia Lorenz: ethnographer behind the camera . In: The daily newspaper: taz . May 24, 2018, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 24 ( taz.de [accessed on May 24, 2018]).
  2. ↑ Brenson Lee: Planet B-Boy - Video documentary about the B-Boy culture
personal data
SURNAME Cooper, Martha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photojournalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore , Maryland , United States