We’re featuring a great interview today from Martha Cooper – whose career retrospective we curated this year at Urban Nation in Berlin. We particularly love the title. Because its true.
“In a photography career that spans six decades, Martha Cooper has broken boundaries and defined genres. She became the first female staff photographer at the New York Post in 1977 and shot seminal images of graffiti and the burgeoning hip hop scene during its infancy.
Now, Cooper is being honored with largest retrospective of her work to date. “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures,” opening this weekend the Berlin’s Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, charts the artist’s photography, from the pictures taken with her very first camera, which she got when she was in nursery school, in 1946, through the present day.
Curated by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, founders of BrooklynStreetArt.com, the show includes images from Cooper’s many books, which feature such as bodies of work as her photographs of women’s breakdancing competitions (We B*Girls); of traditional Japanese tattooist Horibun I at work (Tokyo Tattoo 1970), and the streets of gritty 1970s-era New York City (New York State of Mind).”
“But it was graffiti that inspired Cooper’s best-known work, immortalized in the 1984 book Subway Art, which she published with fellow photographer Henry Chalfant. Cooper was drawn to the tracks by the desire to save for posterity these fleeting artistic creations, which were unlike anything she had ever seen.”
CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING THE INTERVIEW AND ARTICLE WRITTEN BY Sarah Cascone for ArtNet.
“Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” at the Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, Bülowstraße 7, 10783 Berlin. Check the museum’s website for details and hours of operation.
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
Halloween comes to a close after what seemed like a week-long series of events and celebrations thanks to it occurring on Wednesday and no one knowing when to have a party or go trick or treating. ...
Pascal Feucher, Impresario, articulate thought-leader, badass Founder of the Urban Spree compound in Berlin, Germany Pixação is a form of graffiti rooted in the São Paulo underground, a rough coloniza...
We're counting down the last 12 days of 2012 with Street Art photos chosen by BSA readers. Each one was nominated because it has special meaning to a reader or is simply a great photograph from 2012 t...
Bifido in collaboration with Jacoba Niepoort. Calle Libre Festival. Vienna, August 2019. (photo © Bifido) Just below the Vienna U-Bahn, and above the street, there are two new archangels shieldin...
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Hello Friends! Lots of good new graffiti and street art and murals out there this week as the city was pausing for some fireworks – nearly every day including t...