Spray Nation, 1980 NYCS Graffiti photographs, Martha Cooper

"I always tried to give back pictures": this sentence sums up the generous and deeply human approach of photographer Martha Cooper. An American ethnologist with a degree from Oxford, who was in turn an English teacher, an intern at National Geographic, and a globetrotting biker through Thailand, Afghanistan, Russia and Europe, Martha Cooper was the photographer of American graffiti in the streets of New York in the 1980s. 

We discover Lady Pink, TERROR 161, CAP, AMMO, CHRIS 217, TACK, ZEPHYR etc., taken at home, in the evening or in the midst of creation. The beauty of these portraits and photographs of graffiti gives graffiti its rightful place as the art of a people, a people who have covered with colours, characters and poetic messages the world of concrete and misery in which society had forgotten them. The emotion that emerges takes the reader on an unprecedented journey to the New York of the 1980s, then one of the most dangerous cities in the world, but where you could meet Basquiat and Madonna or Keith Haring at a party with TOXIC and KANO at the FUN GALLERY. It is also a tribute to the personal style of each artist, like an exhibition in a forbidden museum, and by its best curator.

At that defining moment in the history of graffiti, no teenager had a good camera on the streets of New York. Martha, on the other hand, had grown up in her father's camera shop in Baltimore, and had been practicing photography for 30 years. Armed with a reporter's instinct and an insatiable curiosity, she went into the wastelands and under the fences, into the parts of New York the rest of the world had never seen. 

"How could a practically 40-year-old woman with the Peter Pan haircut possibly care about ut?" wondered Jayson Edlin the first time he saw Martha Cooper. Yet she did, and better than anyone. Perhaps because she loved children and thought of herself as a child, as evidenced by her huge smile in the few portraits of her in this book. 

Spray Nation introduces Martha Cooper's approach, her personal philosophy through the testimonies of her friends, her admirers, photographers like her, a woman in a man's world. Twenty years after this series of photographs, during a trip to Europe, Martha will discover that American graffiti has swept the world and is running on all the walls and roofs of Europe, and will take up the work again.