Grandma Bgirl
Now in her sixties, Martha Cooper began shooting graffiti over twenty five years ago. A true veteran in the hip hop photo world, she is still documenting and searching for her next discovery.
It was about a month ago that I got an email letting me know about an amazing event put on by powerHouse Books called 'No Sleep Til Brooklyn'. My mouth started to water as I read the lineup of artists that would be in attendance and exhibiting work: the likes of Jamel Shabazz, Ricky Powell, Boogie, Charlie Ahearn, Joe Conzo...and Martha Cooper. Being an old school hip hop photography junkie that I am, I knew that I would be attending this event. I called up my crew and within a few days, I was on a plane to New York to the new powerhouse Books headquarters and gallery. I set up as many interviews as possible before leaving, got a hold of Martha Cooper. We planned to meet at the gallery one hour before she was scheduled to sit on a panel of influential women in hip hop. I had only seen images of her from her younger days, so was not exactly sure who to look for. I soon spotted an older women wearing a sweater that read "Graffiti Can't Be Stopped" across the chest, and rocking a fresh set of earrings that were visibly hand-made out of wire and shaped as little cameras. After a quick introduction I began taking her portrait...getting her to tag a piece of paper and have her pose with it, like she had done with so many bgirls from around the world. We then sat down on a stair set overlooking the gallery and I got to delve into the mind of a women who has had a world wide impact through her images.
EW: Please introduce yourself.
Martha Cooper: Hi I am Martha Cooper and I guess I am here because I photographed Subway Art with Henry Chalfant and then we published it in 84, and sent graffiti around the world.
EW: I want to know a little bit about your self other than photography.
MC: There is not much other than being a photographer, that’s basically what I do, who I am and has been for the last 40 something years. But born in Baltimore, my father had a camera store, so I grew up with a camera since nursery school, and basically looked at the world through a camera. But not just hip hop, that’s the important thing. Hip Hop is just one thing I photograph.
EW: How did you connect with hip hop?
MC: I actually connected through graffiti. It was before the words “hip hop” were being used, in the late seventies, when I saw graffiti in the Lower East Side. I got introduced to Dondi and he basically taught me everything I know about graffiti. At the same time other things were happening and I just got linked up with some of the same kids who were doing other aspects of hip hop at the same time. By accident.
EW: This question has no disrespect intended, but in a scene that's dominated by males, being a white female how did you gain the respect to grant you entry into this scene and shoot so many intimate shots?
MC: I like to think it was through the photographs because I always made an effort to bring the pictures back to the people who were in them. In graffiti especially, photography has always played an important part because the trains got crossed out. So if you had a good picture of a train it would last and as you know it’s lasted way longer than the actual art did and so by providing good pictures of the art, that was my entry.
EW: Where can we find a Martha Cooper bomb? Have you ever partaken as a graffiti writer yourself?
MC: Only enough to know that I would be not very good at it. I mean I have tried a little bit of everything, I mean even tagging – I found out how hard that was. So no I don’t like to do things I am not very good at.
EW: What was the process to your first publication, how did you make that happen?
MC: Actually I was always trying to get my pictures published – especially with the graffiti pictures that ran up against the wall in New York. Just because the word graffiti was associated with vandalism and people would just close there eyes and go ballistic. But I managed to get a story published in a German art magazine and in a Japanese magazine, actually Japanese Playboy. Because I had associations with German and Japanese journalists at the time, they got the stories into the magazines.
EW: In the b-boy and emcee scene there are battles and within the graff scene people are trying to claim their walls and stuff like that. Back in the day and even now, did you ever feel that competitive nature with other photographers?
MC: Absolutely. I think Henry and I, Henry Chalfant with whom I did “Subway Art” we had a little competitive thing going and I think it was a luck thing because when we heard about a train we both ran out and tried to catch it and Henry stood on the platform and photographed the trains in sections as they rolled by and I stood off in a vacant lot somewhere and got the whole scene. So our pictures are very different but if we heard there was a fresh new whole car out there we were racing to get it and I do feel competitive. I don’t like to give my sources away to other photographers.
EW: So how did it work? Did you get a link from someone? Were the writers telling you “will you shoot this for me”?
MC: Not a link like a computer. Like a telephone call. We needed to know the line, like the one line or the two line – and the entire circuit of the two you would see both sides of the train but the one ran both back and forth without turning around, so on the one you especially needed to know which side they had painted on and they would know. The writer’s could tell me. I call it the morning side or the afternoon side, because the trains ran North and South so we wanted the sun to hit it. You didn’t want it backlit, so either it was going to be in the morning that would be the best photograph, or the afternoon so they would tell me.
EW: How does your family feel about this – what about back when you were starting and doing that book? You didn’t have the success you have today. Is your family supportive?
MC: I got a little bit of flack. Not a lot – I mean my family has always been very supportive, but I remember my mother visiting me in New York and I dragged her up to the Bronx and she sat in the car and waited for this train and we caught it so she got the idea.
EW: You shot a book called “We B-Girlz” featuring bgirls stories from around the world. I wanted to know what your thoughts are on the representation of hip hop, globally.
MC: I am not the authority of women in hip hop and I am not that much involved with women in hip hop. All I know is that in terms of the bgirls when I was traveling around Europe for the “Hip Hop Files” book I saw b-girls for the first time and I had never seen really good bgirls dance and I was completely overwhelmed, excited and thought wow this would make a great book, because back in the day I never saw girls. I had no pictures of girls. So that is the only area in which I have any expertise is bgirls. Now of course, I found out its sort of similar with the mc’s and the dj’s; that they have always been out there, it’s just that I never was looking for them and I wasn’t really thinking about them. So I don’t want to speak for bgirls. I mean basically I never really liked the way women in hip hop were portrayed and I think that was the reason why I wasn’t involved. I felt that there was a lot of insulting remarks being made in raps and stuff, but on the other hand I am kind of too old. I am in my sixties now, I am out of that age group that’s going to parties and listening to that music anyway. I simply wasn’t listening to it, so I cant even quote any of the negative remarks that were in those raps.
EW: Who has escaped your lens? Who have you tried to shoot and you haven’t got to?
MC: Taki 183, he is the guy who is credited with starting the whole graffiti movement and he wrote 'Taki 183' all over the walls in New York City. He kind of like jump started the tagging movement in New York in the seventies and I’ve heard rumours of him near there. I mean he is supposedly still around but I’ve never met him. Other than that.. I am not a “who” person, I am an anonymous person. I am a street person. I don’t go after the celebrities. I don’t really care. I figure that plenty of people shoot them.
EW: If you weren’t born when you were born and you could choose any era to document as a documentary photographer and it wasn’t this past sixty five years years, what era would that be?
MC: Oh my goodness, I am perfectly happy with this era. You know I feel extremely lucky to have been at this place, at this time, to have discovered something that has lasted so long. I mean when I started to do this work, never in my wildest dreams did I think we would be talking about it twenty-five years later. That wasn’t my idea; my thought at the time, with the trains and everything, was that this was a very ephemeral part of New York City, very specific to New York. I mean I remember saying to people this could never happen anywhere else. You know this graffiti on trains is only in New York, and I thought it was because of the time; the city was going bankrupt because of things like the holes in the fences that made it easy for writers to get into the yards. I thought in squeaky clean places like Stockholm and Germany, their trains would be totally locked up tight you know with no chance to get into the yards, and my idea was this was historic preservation. I am taking these pictures because this thing is going to be over in a year or two and I will have these pictures and it’s just amazing to me. And so could I pick a different time, no. I mean for me I like to discover things. I don’t particularly want to be the person assigned to go shoot hip hop, or go shoot graffiti. For me, I lose interest. I want to be out there with my camera exploring and looking and seeing something that I have never seen before, so that was ideal. It fit my perspective perfectly.
EW: What’s the next tip, what are you discovering now?
MC: I went to Baltimore because I wanted to give myself a chance to look at a place in depth, and also I bought a little house in a poor neighbourhood with the idea that I could become a part of the neighbourhood in a way that I had never done before, because always in New York I was going to these neighbourhoods but I didn’t live in those neighbourhoods and I wanted to establish a longer term relationship with the people in the neighbourhoods. I haven’t been doing this very long in Baltimore but there are all kinds of interesting things that I have come across. I am excited about it. I wish I brought some of them to show you. And you know street art is one of them, but it’s not a heavy street art scene there. It's more…there’s some old fashion things. Guys with carts, they call them arabbers and they have the push carts and they pack them full of groceries and I went out with this one guy last week and it took him 2 ½ hours just to arrange the fruits and vegetables on his cart. It was an artwork. It was absolutely gorgeous. I mean, now I think I would love to make a film of him explaining 'why?'. He said it’s all about the colours and shapes and everything. That sort of excited me, because there weren’t like five other photographers standing there. I don’t like to be elbow to elbow with other photographers, and I think when I am, I don’t do particularly well. I think that they probably, in general, would out shoot me. I think my talent is more finding something, what I shoot, figuring out what to shoot, then it is how I shoot it. It’s not about the angle.
EW: You've seen hip hop explode globally, please tell me how you have seen it grow and affect the world.
MC: In the widest broadest analysis I would say that it has in fact changed the art world, and not only the art world but the design and graphics world too. And certainly the world of lettering and fonts because where ever I go I see things that I recognize as being influenced by graffiti or at least that’s my perception. I think there are a lot of art directors who if they weren’t graffiti artists, or graffiti writers themselves, they certainly grew up in that age and are familiar with it and they respond to that sensibility. I think it has pervaded the world that we live in, in ways that people don't even recognize. I would like two see that book out there. I think there is an aesthetic appreciation for the kinds of lettering and style or styles that were invented by graffiti artists that have come into the market place. I just saw an ad for Porsche, I don’t know if you saw that ad, its got graffiti. I can’t read it, it was wild style and I am wondering who did it and how that happened. I hope somebody is writing about this, I hope it’s somebody’s PhD dissertation. In the high art world, the whole street art movement has certainly come in into the galleries, not just like transferring graffiti onto canvas that was kind of the early example, but now more, way broader aesthetics of street art. Gallery owners have picked up on that and are trying to sell it one way or the other and trying to make money. It’s phenomenal. It’s an acquired taste and people have acquired it. In fact, many advertising companies want to acquire it because they feel like that’s their market, again I feel so lucky to have seen it. How many people get to do that in one lifetime, to go from zero to a hundred? I would say hip hop is the pre-dominate role of youth culture in everything, and graffiti although it has always been sort of a poorer cousin, is coming into it’s own. I mean it has kept some attachment to hip hop, although when you say hip hop in New York people tend to think of the music, not the art. But the art is definitely an important part of hip hop, and an important part of the world at the moment.
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Critical too?
Your opening paragraph had some weird sentence structure. Also, it's 'than' not 'then, 'Dondi' not 'Donde' and 'affect' not effect'. "in ways that people don't even recognized"?
thank you
thank you for your editing notes. this will be taken care of asap, just slipped by us.
much respect!
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Bad Ass! We all (writers) owe alot to Martha Cooper...