Martha Cooper

Martha Cooper ( born 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American photojournalist who has documented their pictures in particular the development of the New York hip- hop culture.

Biography

Martha Cooper photographed at the age of three years. After college, graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, she went in 1963 with the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Thailand.

After two years of teaching she went in 1965 with a motorcycle 20,000 miles from Thailand to Oxford, England, and began a study of ethnology. She is of the opinion not to use the possibilities of the camera and looking for a way, photography and anthropology join.

After working at the Smithsonian Institute, Yale University and completed an internship at National Geographic in 1969 she married the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie; both lived until 1971 in Japan.

After returning to the United States, she worked from 1973 as a photographer for the New York Post. As part of this they met in 1979 in Manhattan's Lower East Side graffiti writer HE3, which brought them into contact with the writing scene. Cooper quickly learned other known sprayer like Dondi, and began to systematically scan the work of young people.

In January 1980, Martha Cooper took the first photos of a phenomenon, which is known as breakdancing today. The pictures are the first documents that report on breakdancing.

The book Subway Art, which she published with photographer Henry Chalfant in 1984, became a milestone of writing documentation and made relevant for a media dissemination of the phenomenon in Europe.