Martha Cooper – Street Play (2006)

Martha Cooper is one of the most influential documentary photographers to emerge from 1970s and ’80s New York City, best known for Subway Art and The Hip-Hop Files, her landmark records of the city’s early graffiti and hip-hop culture. Before that work made her famous, she spent her time as a staff photographer for the New York Post (1977-1980) drawn to a different subject entirely: the children of the Lower East Side, and in particular Alphabet City, then one of Manhattan’s poorest and most neglected neighborhoods.

At the time, Alphabet City was in the middle of severe urban decay, marked by drug activity, petty crime, and blocks of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots. To an outsider, it looked bleak. But as Cooper observed, to the children who grew up there, this same landscape became something else entirely, raw material and open space for the kind of improvised play that adults could never have designed for them. She described how a crumbling tenement became a secret clubhouse, a rooftop became a private aviary, and a pile of trash might be a source for treasure.
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Street Play, published in 2006, brings together over 100 black-and-white photographs from this long-unseen body of work, an essential companion to Cooper’s better-known graffiti photography and a valuable piece of New York City photobook history in its own right. The images document a specific, vanished chapter of urban childhood: unsupervised, resourceful, and inventive in ways that feel almost unrecognizable in cities today. The Museum of the City of New York has since acquired a selection of these photographs for its permanent collection, cementing Street Play’s place as an important visual archive of 1970s Lower East Side street life.

A must-have for collectors of vintage New York photography, documentary photobooks, and fans of Martha Cooper’s wider body of work.

From Here To Fame Publishing, Berlin, Germany. 2006. 210 x 240 mm. Around 120 pages. First edition. Hardcover with dustcover. As new. Texts in English.