MARTHA COOPER
TEXT JACLYN MARINESE
PHOTOS MARTHA COOPER
DATE AUGUST 2, 2004
Martha Cooper started photographing hip-hop culture before the term “hip-hop” even existed. While taking photos of kids on the Lower East Side in 1979 she stumbled upon a graffiti artist who told her he could introduce her to a graffiti king. That king was DONDI, one of the most legendary writers in graffiti history. It was DONDI who brought Cooper into the then-underground world of graffiti artists. Though he passed away in 1998, DONDI’s legacy lives on through his work, and is forever imprinted in Cooper’s photos.
Before meeting DONDI, Cooper says, she didn’t really understand what graffiti was, but she soon became fascinated with it and with the graffiti culture. When her job at the New York Post sent her on an assignment one night in Washington Heights to cover what was supposed to be a riot, what Cooper actually found were a bunch of kids break dancing in the subway. After that, Cooper also began photographing b-boy culture, and her photos of the Rock Steady Crew were published on the cover of the Village Voice before any other American media was documenting the art form. As a result of that and other articles, a slew of media immediately approached the Rock Steady Crew, contributing to their reign as one of the most legendary b-boy crews in hip-hop history.
For over 25 years, Cooper has been documenting urban vernacular art and architecture. From 1977 to 1980 she worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post. In collaboration with Henry Chalfant, she published Subway Art in 1984 (Thames and Hudson/Henry Holt), a book often referred to as “the Bible” by graffiti aficionados. In 1990, she published R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art (Thames and Hudson/Henry Holt) with folklorist Joseph Sciorra. Cooper is currently the director of photography at City Lore, the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture. Her photographs are a testament to the beginning of an era. ‘Sup talked to Cooper about her history in photography and the release of her new book, Hip-Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984 (From Here to Fame), which documents the early years of the phenomenon now known as hip-hop.
What was it like meeting DONDI?
When I was introduced to him, he recognized me and said, ‘Oh, you’re Martha Cooper?’ and he opened up the book where he did his drawings, and on the front cover he had pasted a picture from the New York Post that happened to have a tag of his crew on the wall behind a picture of a girl on a swing, and my credit was under it. So he knew I wasn’t just some odd person prying into his life. I was a reporter who would come to his house, so that’s how he saw me, even though he knew there was little chance that I could get graffiti into the press at that time. And I was interested in this idea of the designing. That was the key to me. That nothing was random and everything we saw as vandalism was actually thought out, and that there were rules that governed it. And that even the tagging on the train – the stuff that looked like complete mayhem – was actually layers of people going over each other, and that all these little scrawls were legible, and that once you sort of learned what they said, you could see that person’s name in a number of different places. So he tutored me in this. And I hadn’t actually seen the pieces on the train yet, because you had to stand and wait for hours to see those pieces. Maybe there’s one piece running per week or something. But then I began to watch trains.
I think it’s amazing that DONDI was the first person to introduce you to this world. I watched the Style Wars DVD with everyone describing what he was like, and it seems he was an influence for so many artists.
He was a lovely, lovely man and very, very smart. He was only around 18 or 19 and very smart, very articulate, soft-spoken, and just perfect. He took me seriously and I took him seriously.
Did you wind up doing a story on DONDI?
At the time I was trying to be a photojournalist, and absolutely no one was interested in this story. But finally I approached a German art magazine and they said they’d publish it. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to go to the yards, because I wanted to include that in the story. I also wanted to see how they did it.
What was it like going into the train yards with those guys?
I didn’t go very many times; maybe around five times. It felt exciting and adventurous, but it never really felt dangerous. I’m a photographer, so that sort of took over. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’re gonna get caught.’ I was just as happy taking pictures as they were painting the train. If you look at the early pictures of DONDI, you see him kind of climbing between the trains, and that’s how they could reach the tops of the trains. You can see that the trains are so much bigger when they’re not on the platforms. In the yards the trains are absolutely enormous, and when you see what it takes to cover an entire train in one night, it’s a lot of painting. I was more fascinated by the process than I was scared or apprehensive about the illegality of it.
What aspects of this subject matter really drew you in?
I did a lot of documentation of what went on. Them sitting around planning. It was like fieldwork. The fascinating thing to me was that they were real artists. What could be realer than to be this into your art form and be in it for no money? It had nothing to do with selling. There was no way they were gonna make any money. It seemed like the realest form of art to me. When I tried to communicate this to other people, they would just go on and on about vandals and how horrible it was.
You left a staff position at the New York Post to pursue this subject. Why?
First of all, when I wanted to do a story in the Post on breakdancing, they wouldn’t let me do it. When they sent me to do the riot and I found these kids who were like, ‘We weren’t fighting, we were dancing,’ I told them to send a reporter, and they did. But the editor was like, ‘Well, no riot. Forget it.’ And they didn’t use it. I was completely pissed off. I had been with them for three years, and the job was wearing thin. It wasn’t just that I wanted to go after these subjects. I just thought that I really wanted to freelance, and I had an opportunity at National Geographic.
Was there ever a time when you thought your photographs wouldn’t be relevant?
Yeah. I would say for the last 15 years I’ve pretty much been out of the scene. We’re calling the book Hip-Hop Files because I literally have enormous files of this stuff. I have all the early flyers and announcements – I never threw any of that stuff away. For me, as a kind of archivist, I like the book a lot because we’re using the term ‘files’ as a sort of theme.
How would you describe New York as a backdrop or subject for your photos?
I love photographing in New York, and I love New York because you’ll never see the same thing twice. It’s not an easy place to live, but it’s an exciting place.
How did you begin taking photos?
My father and uncle had a little camera store in Baltimore, which is actually still in business. My cousin runs it. It’s one of the few family-owned stores that still exist in Baltimore. My father gave me a camera in nursery school, but he was a hobby photographer, not a professional photographer, so I never studied photography growing up.
But you had exposure to photography at a young age.
Yeah, and we would go on camera runs with the Baltimore camera club and do pictorial photographs. If it hadn’t been for that, I might have done something completely different. And photography was the way to my father’s heart. He had a darkroom and would spend hours in it. And he would reward me by printing my photographs in his darkroom. So a way to connect with my dad would be to take a good photograph and he would decide what he wanted to print.
He was your first editor.
Yes, exactly.
So why are you now releasing the book of photos taken 20-plus years ago? Why not earlier?
The one thing that I didn’t take a lot of pictures of was the music part. The reason for that is that as a photographer, looking at a guy with a mic just didn’t seem that interesting, because I’m not into personalities. I never liked shooting entertainers. I’m into shooting the unknown, and the MC/DJ side seemed like the known. So I thought it was a gap. I thought, ‘Too bad I didn’t focus on the MCs and DJs and forget about the graffiti and the break dancing.’ Akim [Walta], who basically put together the book, said to me, ‘Don’t be silly; you have plenty of stuff here.’ He organized it. He thought it was interesting, so I was like, ‘Fine. Go for it.’ Personally, I think the anonymous part of it is as interesting as the famous part. The fact that I’m somewhat responsible for some people becoming more famous than others because we included them – some of the graffiti artists we included in Subway Art are now recognized around the world. I hear this a lot from other artists, ‘You know, Martha, we were out there. We did pieces that were equally interesting. Why didn’t you photograph them?’ And they’re from Brooklyn and I tell them that I lived on the Upper West Side and that I mostly went north, to the Bronx. I didn’t go out to Brooklyn generally. It was kind of the luck of the draw. It’s quirky who becomes famous, and Henry and I bear some of the responsibility for that. I like the idea that the coverage is sort of anonymous people.
Do you still photograph graffiti?
I’m not an avid graffiti shooter for several reasons. One, now especially with digital photography, everyone’s shooting it. Kids can shoot their own stuff, and they can do it really well. If I see something that really interests me, I’ll shoot it. But I don’t go out and look for it.
At the time when you were photographing graffiti and breakdancing, did you have any sense of the images’ future significance?
I definitely remember saying to Henry, ‘This could never happen anywhere else.’ Of course, now it’s all over the world. My perception at the time was that it was a fascinating and extremely local, New York City phenomenon, and I was wrong. I would think, ‘Twenty years from now, when there’s no graffiti on the trains, I’m going to have the pictures.’ I used to think, ‘These editors will eat their words because my pictures will be the ones they’re going to want in 20 years.’ And 20 years later, finally, somebody wants them.
Martha Cooper’s book, “Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984″ was released in mid October and is available in all major bookstores.