Martha Cooper

Martha Cooper

In the late ’70s, Cooper was working as a staff photographer for the New York Post when she encountered a young graffiti artist, who quickly introduced her to the stylized signatures scrawled across walls and subway cars throughout the city. She then befriended legendary graffiti writer Dondi, head of the graffiti clique CIA (“Crazy Inside Artists”), and snapped him on his late-night “trainbombing” trips to rail yards in Brooklyn—the start of a treasure trove of images documenting the music, art, and dance of hip-hop in the city of its birth. “For me, the illegal part was always the most exciting part, and what really interested me was the idea that kids would go to great lengths to do art and that they were doing art for each other—mostly adults didn’t understand that,” she said in 2015. In a subway station in Washington Heights, Cooper also took the first known photos of breakdancing featured in mass media. 

[source: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-12-photographers-who-captured-hip-hop-from-old-school-to-the-90s]