Martha Cooper knew she would be a photographer from the time she was a child and received her first Kodak Brownie camera. She was a photography intern at National Geographic Magazine in the 1960s, and worked as a staff photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s. Martha�s love of travel and fascination with the local cultures have enabled her to create a body of work depicting the lives and routines of people from a variety of places throughout the world.
She is perhaps best known for documenting the New York graffiti scene of the 1970s and '80s. She has degrees in art and anthropology. They don�t call her the �Grande Dame of hip hop documentation� for nothing.
Her photographs have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian and Natural History magazines as well as several dozen books and journals. She is the Director of Photography at City Lore, the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture. Cooper lives in Manhattan but is working on a photo project in Sowebo, a Southwest Baltimore neighborhood.
