Martha Cooper’s Street Art Chronicles

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Cooper hopes that the artists gain something from this engagement. “I would like there to be something in the process for them,” she says. This desire guides the stylistic choices she makes in her photography. In order “to depict the art as the artist wanted it,” she generally avoids cropping and shoots head on, “without distortion from lenses or angles.” In compiling Going Postal, she negotiated the layouts to ensure that each sticker was shown in its entirety and, when possible, asked the artists for help in image selection. And because many of the artists “are relatively unknown,” Cooper combined Going Postal’s release party with the show at Ad Hoc, so people could “celebrate them as well as celebrate the publication of the book.”

From an outside perspective, it would appear as though Cooper has developed a commendable modus operandi, following the things that inspire her, structuring projects to allow for detailed investigation, and developing collaborative relationships with the people she meets along the way. But she thinks the model could be improved upon. In her current project, an on-going documentation of a Baltimore neighborhood, she’s immersing herself even more deeply than in past projects. She bought a row house there three years ago, and has since visited every couple of weeks to walk around the neighborhood and take photos. She’s been pleased with the results thus far. “Already,” she notes, “many things have changed,” and she’s been there to record the shifts. And her neighbors now expect—and respect—the photographer in their midst: “People recognize me on the street and are friendly and even request photos.”

In a manner befitting a photographer who’s spent her career eschewing catchy angles in favor of slower ethnographic methods, Cooper maintains that there’s “no grand plan about the final result” for the Baltimore project. That’s a good way, incidentally, to talk about her body of work more generally. Her photos possess an abiding faith in their subjects’ ability to speak for themselves. Cooper moves with the conviction that what they have to say is important, and if she has an agenda, it’s to open up a better platform for them to do so. This commitment to producing open-ended images might not lend itself to an orderly news story, but it makes for some pretty powerful work.

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