By Deborah Rudacille

The teenager with the gold-capped front teeth might have let Martha Cooper take his picture if he had known that she was a famous hip hop photographer. Or maybe not. Hanging out with his buddies on a cold winter day, washing a big black SUV on a windswept Southwest Baltimore street that looks straight out of The Wire, he is skittish about being photographed. “Naw,” he says repeatedly, shaking his head as Cooper tries to persuade him. The beaming middle-aged gentleman in a mudcloth robe standing in front of a storefront mosque a few blocks away is more enthusiastic. “Come take my picture,” he commands as soon as he sees Cooper rounding the corner, smiling broadly as she snaps him with his arm around a friend.

Few of Cooper’s neighbors in this gritty corner of her hometown know that the woman they call “Picture Lady,” a petite white woman in her mid-sixties who snaps their pictures one weekend and then pops up a couple of weekends later to distribute the prints, is a celebrity herself—nor that some of the hippest people on the planet fly her around the world to photograph their events. “They don’t ask me because I’m the best photographer in the world,” Cooper says dismissively. “They ask me because of what I did back in the day.”

What she did back in the day was document the birth of a new culture as it bombed, scratched and spun onto the streets of New York City. Martha Cooper’s iconic photos of graffiti-sprayed subway trains, hooded teens wielding cans of Krylon in deserted yards, and skinny kids twisting and flipping on flattened cardboard boxes on the streets helped introduce hip hop culture to the world—even though neither she nor the kids thought of it in those terms at the time. “I didn’t say to myself, I’m gonna go around and photograph hip hop,” she points out. “Now it’s a known thing. Back then it wasn’t.”

Working as a New York Post photographer in the mid-seventies, Cooper always liked taking photos of kids. One day she noticed a boy drawing in a notebook and when she asked him what he was doing, he told her that he was practicing his tag. That chance encounter led to her meeting with Dondi, a graffiti “king” famous throughout the five boroughs. Through Dondi she met other artists who—once they realized they could trust her—were pleased that Cooper wanted to document their art. “They always photographed their own work. The photo was how you proved that you did it because the pieces themselves didn’t last long,” she points out. “So as soon as I started giving back the pictures, that was my entre into their world.”

Subway Art, the book Cooper published in 1984 with fellow photographer Henry Chalfant, is often hailed as the founding text of graffiti culture. Like her images of the first b-boys and rappers to appear on the sidewalks of the Bronx and Harlem, captured in Hip Hop Files: 1979-1984, the book, published in a glossy 25^th anniversary edition last year, memorializes a now vanished era in the city’s history. “What I’m always looking for is people who are making something from nothing,” Cooper says. “I’m looking for people who are doing something creative in their circumstances.”

One time her New York Post editors sent her out to photograph a riot in a subway station. The cops on the scene told her that the kids weren’t rioting. They were dancing. “I asked the kids to demonstrate what they were doing,” she says and snapped roll after roll of photos of the kids spinning and twisting on the pavement. It took her a year to get the photos published mostly because editors had no idea what they were seeing. Even Cooper herself didn’t realize the significance of the photos. “I thought I was documenting something specific to New York City. I didn’t really know how far it had spread till I started going to Europe to these events, huge events” after Hip Hop Files was published.

Today Cooper, who still lives in New York City, is invited to shoot street art shows and b-boy competitions from Berlin to Bogota. Her cousin Sally, who has accompanied her to some of those events, has been touched to see the way young people around the world react to meeting the sixty-something Cooper. “Until you go with her, you have no idea how revered she is, how idolized within this subset of the world,” Sally says. “People literally bow down to her. They will have their copy of Subway Art and want her to sign it, talk to her, be in her presence. It really is sweet because of the age difference.”

“I’m old enough to be their grandmother,” Cooper laughs.

Age notwithstanding, Cooper still keeps her eye on the street, with her two newest projects taking her back to basics. In Nametagging, which will be published next month, she captures graffiti stripped down to its core. “The tag is the root of all graffiti,” she points out, and scrawled on a “Hi, my name is” sticker and slapped onto lamp posts, paper boxes, and other solid surfaces on the street, a way to get up quickly and easily. Cooper shot the photos in NYC and Europe. “The stickers are both classic graffiti (names/letters) and street art (images),” she writes in an email. “The kids especially like the idea that they are repurposing materials (name tags) manufactured for corporate use.”

Her other project has taken her back to her own roots. Born and raised in Baltimore, where her father owned a camera store, Cooper today spends two weekends a month in the city, shooting in SoWeBo, a hardscrabble neighborhood with a vibrant street life. “The first time I drove through the neighborhood, I saw a kid jumping on a mattress. I used to see that all the time in New York. I thought, this is it.”

The neighborhood is a typical slice of inner city Baltimore, bordered on one side by Union Square, H.L. Mencken’s old stomping ground, still a bourgeoisie stronghold in the midst of urban poverty and neglect. A few blocks away is The Corner, where former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon set up shop to research multi-generational drug addiction and crime before he fictionalized that world in The Wire. Racially the neighborhood is a mix of whites whose roots are mostly Appalachian and blacks a few generations removed from the South. Just about everyone, save for the Union Square crowd, lives on the razor’s edge between going under and just getting by.

It’s the kind of place where people spend a lot of time socializing outdoors, and Cooper wanders the neighborhood every other weekend, snapping photos of block parties and holiday decorations, the “arabbers” —produce vendors who stable their horses out of a hundred year old barn—and folks just living their lives the best they can. “I wanted a place where there was a lot of street life, and that wasn’t New York anymore,” Cooper says.

One of the first generation of Peace Corps volunteers, assigned to Thailand in the early 1960s, Cooper has a degree in ethnology and has worked with urban folklorists and anthropologists for years at City Lore in NYC and the Library of Congress Folklife Center. She has shot on location in the Arctic for National Geographic and made her living as a freelancer for decades. But street photography remains her first love.

“I don’t know what I want to shoot till I see it,” she says. “To me that’s the fun part.”

Deborah Rudacille is a freelance writer living in Baltimore. Her latest book is Roots of Steel published by Pantheon Books.