Originally published in UP Magazine #6, 2024

After more than 40-years old, the black metal attaché case is showing its age. There are dents and dings, its steel latches have lost their luster, the plastic handle seems about to surrender. Yet this particular case is still holding fast to its singular mission: protecting the first draft of the bible.

The bible, in this context, is the venerable tome Subway Art, in which photographer Martha Cooper heroically captured some of history’s most important artwork before it could be destroyed. And in so doing, Cooper, joined by fellow photographer Henry Chalfant, played a critical role in the history of modern art, helping to preserve the work of New York’s first generation graffiti writers and to inspire like-minded artists the world over.

The firt draft of *Subway Art*, the classic photo book in which photographer Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfan chronicled some of history’s most important artwork before it could be destroyed. Photo by Daryl-Ann Saunders.

Decades after the release of Subway Art, Cooper is well established as a legendary figure in the worlds of photography, graffiti and street art. She celebrated her 80th birthday this year, but shows no signs of slowing down. She shoots new street art in New York and around the world at every opportunity, maintains a schedule of appearances that would wear out someone half her age, and is promoting her 13th book, Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photos. So, yeah, Cooper is one busy octogenarian.

Recently, she unearthed the attaché and placed it on a light-blue cushioned couch in her living room. Sunlight streamed through the corner windows of her Manhattan apartment as she opened the case to reveal its contents, the bound portfolio of photographs she and Chalfant used in 1981 to pitch the book to publishers. She opened the portfolio, gently turning page after page of original photographs mounted in all their faded glory on black paper backgrounds. As she did, she recalled the initial reaction of publishers?

“They hated it,” she said, flashing an impish grin. “All the publishers were based in New York City and they absolutely hated it. They rode the subway everyday to work and they thought graffiti was ugly. New York was going down hill and graffiti was a symbol of all that was wrong with the city. They couldn’t see beyond that,” she said.

The book captured the nascent state of an art movement unlike any in history, but, to be fair, no one knew that at the time, not the prospective publishers, not the public, not the artists, not even the photographers themselves. Should the publishers’ disinterest be on the list of history’s most dumb-headed publishing decisions like the rejections of Gone With the Wind and Moby Dick? Maybe.

As the photographers were putting their proposal together, Cooper was working as a freelancer for the Hamberg-based Gruner + Jahr providing photographs for Stern and some of the European publishing giant’s other magazines. On the recommendation of her contacts there, the two took the oft-rejected portfolio, in its then-new case, to the Frankfurt book fair, where a willing publisher was found in Thames and Hudson. The book was published in the UK and the U.S. in 1984, without fanfare.

“After that, it slowly started going around the world. I knew that it was selling, but I never really understood its impact until much later. Writers today credit the book with spreading the culture, but we didn’t really think much about that at the time,” Cooper said in her typically humble way. Others, however, are not shy about recognizing the historical sweep of the book and Cooper’s contribution to the art world.

Logan Hicks, the renowned Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been photographed by Cooper countless times, said her significance in the world of graffiti and street art, and modern art generally, cannot be overstated: “You will not find any person in this or any other movement that affected every single person working in that movement the way Martha has. There is not a single graffiti writer or street artist today that won’t attest to the importance of Martha’s work,” Hicks added.

Her impact, Hicks said, has been global.

“She was the starting point for everything that happened outside New York. Go to France or Brazil, or virtually anywhere in the world, and people will say ‘I was influenced by that book.”’ Cooper’s studio and her apartment bear this out: There are several stencils by the French street art legend Blek le Rat and an original piece by the Brazilian twin brothers who create under the name OSGEMEOS hanging alongside works by countless American graffiti giants.

Roger Gastman, the author of The History of American Graffiti and curator of Beyond the Streets, the graffiti and street art exhibition that made a huge splash in London’s prestigious Saatchi Gallery after wildly successful engagements in Los Angeles and New York, credits Cooper for her determined focus on graffiti as an art form when few others were interested.

“Graffiti has continued to evolve over the years and Martha is one of the reasons all this has continued to happen because she documented it and made it accessible to people all around the world,” Gastman said from London as he prepared to head to the show’s next stop in Shanghai. Cooper, of course, is well represented in the show and she attended its London opening in February.

“Graffiti is the biggest cultural art movement in history. There is nothing that has touched anywhere near as many cities and as many types of people of widely diverse backgrounds all around the world. And Martha’s work was instrumental in bringing it all together,” Gastman said.

So it’s reasonable to see the creation and publication of Subway Art as the beginning of the Martha Cooper story, but hers is a saga with many beginnings. Does it begin with the four-year-old girl gripping her boxy Kodak Brownie Special near the waterside in her hometown of Baltimore? Or when she moved to New York City to become a photojournalist? Maybe it started when she noticed that first graffiti on a passing subway, or when the young artists began trusting her.

Four-year-old Cooper gripping her boxy Kodak Brownie Special near the waterside in her hometown of Baltimore. Photo by Daryl-Ann Saunders.

Cooper grew up in Baltimore, where her father and uncle ran Cooper’s Camera Mart. She studied art at Grinnell College in Iowa, served in the Peace Corps in Thailand, earned a degree in ethnology from Oxford University, worked at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, interned at National Geographic, and worked as a photographer for The Narragansett Times in Rhode Island before moving to New York and landing a job as a staff photographer for the tabloid New York Post. While working on a series on how inner city kids play, Cooper came upon a boy named Edwin who went by the handle HE3. HE3 showed her his sketch book and suggested she open her eyes to the then embryonic world of graffiti writers.

Through HE3, she met graffiti legend Dondi, an established figure in the scene at the time, who, coincidentally, was already acquainted with Cooper’s work through one of those odd coincidences that might make you believe Cooper was destined to be a part of this scene. In October, 1979, a Cooper photograph ran in the New York Post as part of the kids playing project (this series, along with photographs Cooper took on her own, would later become her book Street Play). The subject of the photograph was a gleeful little boy enjoying a homemade swing set up in a vacant lot. In the background of the shot was a throw-up by Dondi.

When Cooper went to East New York to meet Dondi and a gathering of other graffiti artists they showed her the black books they used to sketch the artwork they would later recreate on trains. On the inside cover of Dondi’s book was a clipping of the kids playing story with the Cooper photograph.

“When I met Dondi, he was already aware of me and my work so that made it a lot easier to develop trust. These were just kids putting their names out there for the world to see. Dondi was so articulate, he really opened my eyes to this world,” Cooper said. Cooper recorded one of her early sessions with Dondi, who died in 1998, and though she no longer has the tape, she produced a typewritten transcript in which he discussed his reasons for wanting to be a part of the graffiti movement.

“That’s the ultimate thing. That’s what all graffiti writers work for you know, to get in the books or to get on the train to be known by people not only by graffiti writers, but by other people like you’re known for your art,” he told Cooper.

Sean Corcoran, the senior curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, said Cooper’s interest in documenting the lives and adventures of the young graffiti artists set her apart from other photographers of the era.

“There were a few photographers documenting the scene by shooting the trains and other work, but Martha was different. She wanted to shoot the art, but she also wanted to shoot the kids who were making it and what their lives were like. She got on the train, went out to East New York and met these kids, heard their stories, went to the train yards to document them working and went into their rooms and saw them writing in their black books. She saw what their lives and adventures were like. No one else did that then, or since then,” Corcoran said.

Remember, this was all taking place at a time New York City was near bankruptcy, murders were at near-record highs, the crack epidemic was raging, hopelessness was in ample supply. And the art these kids were creating was a crime that was taken very seriously by authorities. As Dondi described it to Cooper: “There used to be a squad of 10 cops just for graffiti…They would wait at the stations, they know the kids, they see you looking at trains, they watch you….Like once they see a new piece of your’s, and they know who you are and everything, they come and get you, you know, they won’t even give you a chance.”

Once she was accepted into the clandestine world of the graffiti writers, Cooper was hooked.

“After that, I began driving up to the Bronx to look for locations where I could get a clear view of the trains. This turned into obsessive behavior, as I was soon getting up before dawn to catch the morning rush hour and sometimes spending five hours standing in the middle of a vacant lot in the Bronx trying for the perfect shot that combined good light with a great piece and an interesting contextual background,” she said in the Q&A style introduction to Subway Art.

After the publication of Subway Art, not much was happening in the graffiti world, particularly on the trains. Through the 1990s, after a crackdown largely eliminated large-scale graffiti from the subways, the artists migrated to the street and the work evolved from simple tags, into stylized letters and then larger and larger scale artistic productions. Sometimes it was sanctioned and curated as what was once seen as vandalism took on new legitimacy.

“Something changed after that, I don’t know what it was,” Cooper said. It could have been the maturing of the artists and their work, or the recognition that the world was being consumed by the first-ever global art movement, it could have been the Internet’s ability to link artists and expose vast audiences to an art form that was so accessible and democratic. Who knows, but suddenly, there was money in it.

“One of the things that attracted me to graffiti at first was that they were doing it for themselves and there wasn’t any money in it. So it was more of a pure art form in that sense. But these artists need a way to live, so why not be able to make some money at it,” Cooper said.

Today, of course, there is little argument about graffiti and street art and the historical significance of the movement. Entire galleries are devoted exclusively to the work of artists who got their start in the streets with works by the biggest names like Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquate and Keith Haring carrying stratospheric price tags.

“I think it’s bigger than pop art, it’s the biggest art movement in the history of the world,” she said, noting that graffiti and its spawn street art are practiced by millions of people around the world, there are no real barriers to entry and the work can be seen instantly by billions everywhere via the Internet.

Cooper signing books at the International Center for Photography in New York City. Photo by Daryl-Ann Saunders.

After years of making very little money from her graffiti photographs, Cooper and her work are in demand more today than ever. One recent example is a collaboration that yielded a coffee table and throw pillow featuring Cooper’s photograph of first generation graffiti great Futura’s iconic work “Break,” a whole-car piece he executed in 1980.

And personal appearances? Well let’s just say few photographers are in as great demand as Cooper. Seated at her computer in her studio recently, she scrolled swiftly through page after page of appointments and events she planned to attend over the balance of 2023. There were so many it was impossible to read them all, but Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Sacramento and Salina, Kansas, were among the many destinations on the list.

Steven P. Harrington, who with partner Jaime Rojo founded BrooklynStreetArt.com and curated Cooper’s career-spanning retrospective exhibition “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” at the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, said Cooper’s influence on the evolution of the 21st Century’s essential art movement was immeasurable.

“Martha's methodical approach to documenting the techniques, process, nomenclature, and people involved in graffiti culture helped humanize the aerosol expressions and writing on the trains and to change those greater negative perceptions,” he said. It has been a selfless task for Cooper and it still is.

“She uses the camera to record, to document, with very little interest in editorializing – primarily out of her own curiosity. Even today, at events where she is the main attraction, she is often more interested in photographing attendees than being in front of the camera herself,” Harrington said.

Cooper sitting on the bench she adopted in the Upper West Side’s Riverside Park. Photo by Daryl-Ann Saunders.

When camera’s do catch Cooper these days, she is invariably accompanied by two things that have been her reliable companions over the course of her six-decade career: her camera and that Douchine smile. She wore that smile recently, during a walk in the Upper West Side’s Riverside Park, where she paused at a bench she has officially adopted. She likes to take photos from her apartment window of people sitting here, imaging, perhaps, some of her beloved graffiti writers planning their next adventures.

An inscription on a plaque she had affixed to the bench, drafted with an assist from Harrington, says: “A (graffiti) writer’s bench of my own, a place to plan more adventures as I gaze upward to the windows of this captivating city.”

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