Martha Cooper

Martha Cooper is an American photojournalist. She worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post during the 1970s. She is best known for documenting the New York City graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1984, Cooper and Henry Chalfant published their photographs of New York City graffiti in the book Subway Art, which has been called the graffiti bible and, by 2009, had sold half a million copies. Cooper picked up photography at the age of three. She graduated from high school when she was 16 years old, She taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, journeyed by motorcycle from Bangkok to London and received an anthropology diploma from the University of Oxford.

She was a photography intern at National Geographic in the 1960s, and worked as a staff photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s. Her photographs have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian and Natural History magazines as well as several dozen books and journals.

Her most known personal work, the New York City graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s, began while working at the New York Post. In 1984, she put together a book of photographs illustrating the graffiti subculture called Subway Art.

In the 1980s, Cooper worked briefly in Belize photographing the people and archaeological remains of the Mayan culture at sites such as Nohmul and Cuello.

Cooper in front of a large version of her photograph "Two Cops Patrolling Subway, Bronx, NY, 1981", in Berlin, 2014.

Cooper lives in Manhattan, but from 2006 to 2016 she was working on a photography project in Sowebo, a Southwest Baltimore neighborhood.

In 2019, she was the subject of a documentary feature titled Martha: A Picture Story.

Publications Subway Art. By Cooper and Henry Chalfant. Thames & Hudson, London, 1984; Henry Holt, New York, 1984. R.I.P.: New York Spraycan Memorials. Thames & Hudson, 1994. Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984. From Here to Fame, 2004. Street Play. From Here to Fame, 2005. We B*Girlz. text by Nika Kramer, PowerHouse, 2005. Tag Town. Dokument Press, 2007. New York State of Mind. PowerHouse, 2007. Going Postal. Mark Batty, 2009. Name Tagging. Mark Batty, 2010. Tokyo Tattoo 1970. Dokument, 2012. Postcards from New York City. Dokument, 2012. One Week With 1UP. Publikat GmbH, 2021. Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photos. Prestel, 2022.