Martha Cooper snapped her way into history as an integral part of New York City’s brimming, relevant, and empowering eras of the late seventies, eighties, and beyond. Always on hand with a finger on the trigger of her camera, Cooper spotted the significant impact that graffiti, b-girl culture, and artistic life in the Big Apple could have on the world. Her vast anthropological studies of these times mark the cultural renaissance that made New York City famous while bringing these people and their lives to a prominent forefront.
It wasn’t just New York City where Martha honed her skills with the lens. She parlayed art and anthropology degrees into world travels, sometimes on a motorcycle, using her tender shutter to allow the essence of life to shine through the glossy paper. When looking at her work as insightful rather than impacting, her photographs posses the ability to truly let the viewer into the subject’s life, showing the rawness of emotion that can only be found when studying the way an immensely diverse group of people interact within their culture and surroundings.
With New York City and the world under her belt, Martha Cooper turned her attention to Baltimore. Charm City, which is also Cooper’s hometown, beckoned her back with the interesting changes occurring in of one of the city’s neighborhoods.
Sowebo, Southwest Baltimore, went through your standard city neighborhood plight: everything’s going fine, the Reagan era brings on urban decay, cheap rent brings on gentrification. But, instead of the last step leading to a mass exodus towards the ten block radius, the neighborhood, rather than falling through the cracks, lives in them, surrounded by the same problems of crime, drugs, and poverty that have plagued it for years.
Cooper bought a home in this neighborhood, and since then, has used her camera to show the way-side community. She became it’s official photographer. Taken between 2006 and 2009, these photos bring to light what is normally hidden by the neglect of city organizers, leaving the neighborhood to fight for itself.
