Martha Cooper who is an American photojournalist born in the 1940s in Baltimore, Maryland but left for Grinnell College in Iowa when she was 16. After that she lived in a lot of places, including Thailand, England, Japan, and Rhode Island. It was only in 1975 that she moved to New York City because it was the centre of editorial photography and she wanted to be where the action was. She is the photographer who introduced graffiti to the world. Martha Cooper’s photographs of New York graffiti in the seventies and eighties helped catapult hip hop around the globe. She doesn't just take pictures of graffiti in New York, she has been to South Africa, Papeete in Tahiti and seen and captured some of their work.
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Her work is all about colour. This is because graffiti is all about using bright colours to stand out above others and grabs your attention when you see it, it makes you double glance at the artwork. She is the woman who was introduced to graffiti in the late 70's when it was considered to be an 'underground phenomenon'. It was from here that she met some of the best graffiti artists and get to experience what it was like to be in the life of a graffiti artist. after she met with these artists, she wrote a book about it called 'Subway Art' which was published in 1984.
MARTHA COOPER
Some of Martha's work:
The genre of her work would be the streets. She uses the method of surrealism to show her style of work. This includes the use of graffiti in all of her images. She uses a wide variety of different angles to capture her work; close up, establishing shots, head on and low angles.
The formal elements of her work would be the use of colour. Martha is known for her use of colour because she captures graffiti. This works really well because graffiti is rarely done in black because it doesn't stand out as much as colour would.
In Martha's work, she focuses on variety. She likes to be different and that is proved through her work in the 80's. She sometimes uses leading lines but that depends on what the artist designs on the wall.
A lot of Martha's work is of the urban environment however some pictures are of people and capturing the artists at work or the kids having fun or even couples/friends. All of her work is direct and from real life because she captures the generation of graffiti growing and becoming a think rather than it being frowned upon.
Martha's work holds a story behind every image. This story is what made the 80's and how they grew up, what was right and what was wrong at that time. She documented the late 70's and 80's and showed it to the world through her photographs.
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Martha has really inspired me to focus my final response on the world of graffiti, colour and textures as I find it really interesting and that I get to play around with the variety of colours in PhotoShop to enhance my work. I love the idea of working with colour rather than just black and white but I will incorporate some black and white images to show the detail of the work as the majority of the time, black and white is used to show all of the textures and detail in someones work.