If this doesn’t excite you already read excerpts from the article below by Steve P. Harrington in tasj vol ii – issue v.

Martha Cooper, Photographer of Art on the Streets for Six Decades

“The daughter of a Baltimore camera store owner, Martha Cooper’s romance with photography began in the 1940s when bobby-soxers and penny loafers were the sign of edgy youth culture. Her dad, an amateur photographer himself, gave his small girl a camera and together they hit the streets in search of adventure. “Yeah, my father used to take me out and we would take pictures. That’s what I thought photography was…we were just looking for pictures,” she recalls. Six decades later, Cooper is still looking for pictures; meanwhile, many works from her archive are cited as pivotal recordings of the birth of hip-hop culture and its plastic art form, graffiti. [...]

“Hungry for discovery, Cooper would spend her time to and from assignments in bombed-out neighborhoods, where she took pictures of kids entertaining themselves with games they devised on the street, often with the humblest of materials. It was during one of those trips that she stumbled on graffiti and the members of its community. She met a young boy who suggested she photograph the work she was seeing, then showed her a stylized drawing of his name, or piece, in his notebook.

“Then he asked her if she wanted to meet “The King”.

“Following this lead to Brooklyn, Cooper met Dondi, the citywide-famous graffiti writer who kept a published photo of hers in his black book because its background contained one of his graffiti throw-ups. Cooper quickly realized that she had stumbled into a lively street culture and became an avid student of the teen writers she befriended. By the time she took her last news picture for the New York Post in 1980, her primary desire was to capture as many pieces, tags, and trains as she possibly could find. Today, she remarks on her near-obsessive devotion to documenting New York’s graffiti: waking before dawn to hit the street, waiting five hours for a freshly painted #2 train to pass with the sun at her back and countless secret adventures with vandals in train yards, evading transit police in order to pursue a shot.

Joining efforts with fellow graffiti photographer, Henry Chalfant, Cooper proposed putting together a book of their documentation. The pair endured multiple rejections from publishers while lugging around a big “dummy” book with their pictures glued to the pages. Eventually, however, they landed a deal and Subway Art was published in 1984. Although not an immediate success, it came to sell half a million copies and established itself as a holy book for fans, aspiring artists and art historians worldwide. By the time the 25th anniversary edition was published in 2009, generations of graffiti and street artists had been influenced by it and the hip-hop culture Cooper and Chalfant had captured had gone global.”

This year Primary Flight welcomed approximately 150 artist to Miami this Basel. Primary Flight launched its new space, “Primary Projects,” with a solo exhibition by Retna (Marquis Lewis). The breakout artist is quickly rising, named one of Basel’s top five most important artists by Esquire magazine.

Trusto Corp, whose mission is “dedicated to highlighting the hypocrisy and hilarity of human behavior through sarcasm and satire,” produced an interactive circus in Cafeina’s lot. Common products, brands and games were given new meaning under this group’s warped, artful eyes, while artists Ron English, Tristan Easton, Reyes, Mr. Jago, Bask, Tes One, Tatiana Suarez and more created larger-than-life murals.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below you will find special shots by Remi/Rough, Primary Flight and Martha Cooper to skim through and wish you were there.