She brought graffiti culture to the world with her camera. Now, over 35 years later, Martha Cooper is featured in a new documentary.
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00People were so angry about graffiti, and they felt personally attacked by graffiti.
00:06And they didn't understand because it was like a form of personal advertising.
00:18It's not as if I love every piece of graffiti that I see written on every wall,
00:24and I don't like it if I see it on a marble statue, for example, or a beautiful building.
00:30I would prefer that graffiti writers stick to writing their names on things that don't matter.
00:44I very badly wanted to be a photographer.
00:47I was willing to do whatever it took, and it turned out it took a lot.
00:51The early tags were simply just writing their nickname, with maybe a street number.
00:57And little by little, they got more and more complicated,
01:00until you see some of the amazing, wild-style graffiti today, where you can't even read the names.
01:07You could recognize the style even before you could read the name, and I found that fascinating.
01:22I was doing a personal project documenting kids on the Lower East Side who were doing creative things,
01:37and one boy explained to me that he was writing his nickname on the wall,
01:42and he showed me his notebook in which he was practicing to write on the wall.
01:47And that was like a lightbulb going off. I was like, oh, okay, now I get it. These are names.
02:00To me, that makes it even more interesting, that it's illegal.
02:05Some people have changed their mind, and people that understand it,
02:08but there are plenty of people that think that the word graffiti is synonymous with vandalism.
02:17It makes the city more interesting, as you're walking around, to see things that are written by hand on the wall,
02:31as opposed to seeing tons of advertising everywhere.
02:34I deplore the fact that there's so much advertising all over New York.
02:48Wouldn't it be amazing if all the trains were covered with names and paintings from kids?
03:01But I don't particularly want the city to say, okay, come and decorate our trains.
03:09Giving people permission to paint would make it into a completely different culture.
03:17For more UN videos visit www.un.org