Under the cover of night, Martha Cooper crept into train yards to document some of New York’s most legendary graffiti writers as they brandished spray cans, unfurling masterpieces on the outside of subway trains in 1981 and ‘82. The petite photographer slipped through a hole cute into the chain link fence, agilely maneuvering her way between the massive steel cars, quick to duck under one if a train worker came by, taking tremendous care not to touch the third rail, through which 600 volts of live electricity steadily coursed.
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Cooper carefully took aim as writers like DONDI, DEZ, DAZE SKEME, MIN, SHY, and LADY PINK worked feverishly through the night, painting their names on the exterior of a single subway car, a “canvas” that was 50 feet long by 12 feet high. “It was so dark they couldn’t even see what color the paints were,” Cooper says. “They were lighting matches — where the whole can could explode — to see the color of the paint.”
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To call graffiti “death defying” would not be an overstatement, for many writers have died or been badly injured in their quest to “get up.” Often teenagers, writers were willing to risk it all for what they loved. Though Cooper was nearing 40, she was no less daring. She just quit her job as the first woman staff photographer at the New York Post in 1980 so that she could have more time to document graffiti.
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“I was ambitious and the Post wasn’t enough. I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer,” says Cooper, who was also the first woman photographer to intern for the fabled photo magazine in 1968. Cooper envisioned her portrait of New York’s artistic underground would catapult her to the top of the documentary photography scene but things didn’t work out quite like she planned.
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