Subway art review

 

I personally really like graffiti, I saw this book on a site. So I bought it, I was really blown away by it. 

 

Subway art is a book by Martha Cooper. The book is about graffiti applied on the subways back in the 1970s and the 1980s, in New York. 

Martha Cooper is a photographer, who wanted to shoot pictures of how it was in the Bronx in New York. At that time, there was a lot of graffiti in the Bronx, and basically throughout New York. 

Someone wanted to show Martha Cooper something he made using spray-cans. And that’s when

Martha got into the whole graffiti scene. She met with a lot of popular writers at that time, and made a lot of pictures of their work. 

A lot of that work was done on subways. The writers did their ‘pieces’ on subway trains, because a lot of people would see it, and the name that the writers chose would get more popular (they chose a fake name, so the police would not know who is behind the stuff they did, because graffiti of course is illegal).

Martha Cooper had collected a lot of pictures of painted subways over time. So she made a book about it. 

 

There isn’t really a story in the book. No beginning, plot, ending.

 At the beginning there is an interview. But the book is mostly filled with pictures. I bet the pieces always tell a great story though, I personally think is a missed chance that they did not put stories of the writers with the pictures. How they sneaked into the train yards for example. And how they got their paint. What would happen if they got caught. 

It is just that everything in the book has a story behind it and it is kind of sad to see nothing of that coming back.  

 

 

The quality of the pictures are really great. It’s a nice, rich feeling paper. With a shine coating. 

And Martha Cooper did a great job shooting them. She got on top of buildings to get a nice view of the subways. In the morning sun, most of the pictures seem to be taken at around 9:00-11:00 AM, so the lighting is perfect. 

 

 

 

 

For most graffiti writers from today this book is like the bible for them. 

If you like graffiti or just art in general, this could be something for you. 

But if you do not like any of this, it could be kind of boring for you. 

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