Martha Cooper in New York Times
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The New York Times has recently featured an article on the graffiti photographer, Martha Cooper.
THE young man had been painting all night, in the dark, wedged between two subway trains at the New Lots Avenue railyard in Brooklyn. One hand held an aerosol can; the other was braced against a metal door
First came the outline of the nickname his mother had given him, “D-O-N-D-I,” and then the shadings and shadow lettering that gave his “piece” its three-dimensional look. Taxicab yellow, delta blue, orange, pink — the air was toxic with Krylon. It was sunrise when the painter — and Martha Cooper, the photographer recording his pulsing, illicit art — finished work.
In the 1970s, Donald White, or “Dondi,” a graffiti writer from East New York, helped spawn an urban art movement that flourished across five continents. Ms. Cooper, working for The New York Post, was on its front lines, documenting the artists who labored in the city’s shadows.
