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Street Play
Photographs by: Martha Cooper
Introduction by: Carlos “MARE 139” Rodriguez
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From 1977 to 1980 Martha Cooper was a staff photographer at the New York Post. Working out of her car, she drove around the city’s five boroughs from assignment to assignment, always on the lookout for interesting feature shots. Cooper quickly found that the city’s poorer neighborhoods had the richest street life and her favorite location became Manhattan’s Alphabet City—north of Houston Street between Avenues A and D—as she would habitually wind through Manhattan’s Lower East Side on her way back to the Post at the end of the day.
In Street Play, Cooper takes us through the Alphabet City of the late 70s, when this area was undergoing extensive urban renewal—a process that is still continuing today. At the time, the neighborhood had more than its share of drug dealers and petty criminals, and the landscape often seemed ugly and forbidding. But to the children who grew up there, the abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots made perfect playgrounds, providing raw materials and open space for improvised play. A crumbling tenement housed a secret clubhouse, rooftops became private aviaries, and a pile of trash might be a source for treasure.
Street Play shows the creative and indomitable spirit of city kids determined to make the best of their inhospitable environment. Today the neighborhood is transformed, although the days of go-carts and skelly caps can still be found down certain streets between new developments and parks. Martha Cooper’s work attests to a transitional, post-tenement and preartist period on the Lower East Side when this street culture was not pushed to the fringes of this already out-of-the-way neighborhood, but held turf in Alphabet City.
Martha Cooper is a documentary photographer who has specialized in urban vernacular art and architecture for more than twenty-five years. Cooper worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post from 1977 to 1980, when she left to follow the emerging hip hop scene. In 1984, in collaboration with Henry Chalfant, she published Subway Art (Thames & Hudson), the classic book showcasing the best painted trains of the era that has been dubbed “The Bible” by graffiti writers. Cooper’s other books of photographs include Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979–1984 (From Here To Fame, 2004) and R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art (Henry Holt, 1994) with text by folklorist Joseph Sciorra. The Director of Photography at City Lore, the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture, she lives in Manhattan.
Carlos “MARE 139” Rodriguez is a veteran of the golden years of New York City subway painting. His sculpture, produced over the past twenty years, creates a bridge between style writing and modern sculpture. He designed the BET Award and has work in the collections of Robert DeNiro and fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko. MARE 139 was an Associate Producer on the DVD rerelease of Style Wars, the classic hip hop documentary, and launched the award-winning website www.stylewars.com in 2004. He lives in New York.
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