Martha Cooper: On the Street

From 14 March to 8 April, CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in its Project Room presents a part of the exhibition “Martha Cooper: On the Street” (curated by Enrico Bisi), which forms part of the programme Sottodiciotto Film Festival & Campus (Turin, 16-23 March 2018).

The exhibition, the largest ever in Italy dedicated to the historical photographer of the hip-hop movement, takes place in three locations – CAMERA, the Courtyard of the Rectorate and the Library of the Rectorate of the Università degli Studi in Turin – and sets out to take visitors on a journey following the temporal and artistic evolution of Martha Cooper, who will be a guest at CAMERA on Wednesday, 21 March at 18h30, to talk about her photography.

The first part, set up at CAMERA, hosts about 45 black and white images dating back to the mid-seventies and the start of the photographer’s career, when the young photojournalist of the New York Post, reported on the Big Apple before the dawn of hip hop, focusing on the metropolitan landscape and, above all, street games played by the very young.

“Martha”, explains curator Enrico Bisi, “looks at the life of New York. In her photographs we see the toothless smiles of kids in the middle of the rubble of the Bronx, ‘Carrie’, ‘Super Fly’ and ‘Saturday Night Fever’ at the cinema. Her subjects seemed to fly in order to jump over a puddle and not muddy their shoes, jump into water, jump from the fire escape onto a crumpled mattress, do somersaults, jump with skates or twirl clinging to a rope that acts as a swing. Through the lens, Martha Cooper always looks for something living, that moves, that breathes, she looks out for that ‘beat’ that is there one moment and gone the next. It is the fleeting moment that you breathe in every one of Cooper’s photographs and you get the feeling of looking at something that no longer exists.”