There’s doubtless no one in the world more widely recognized for graffiti photography than American photojournalist Martha Cooper. She has been photographing graffiti and hip-hop culture since the late 1970’s. Her early 1980’s photos in Subway Art, soon to be released in a 25th Anniversary Edition, have remained a major source of inspiration for each new generation of writers. Subway Art is often referred to as the Graffiti Bible, and is the definitive book on early New York graffiti. Her latest book Going Postal from Mark Batty Publisher is a 96 page photographic exploration of artwork on mailing labels such as USPS 228’s, UPS, DHL, FedEx, and international mailing labels mostly seen in New York and Philly. The title suggests the notion of going crazy and sticking labels everywhere, and the book presents a photographic collection of the work of street artists who are doing just that.

The introduction includes Cooper’s thoughts on street stickers and their relationship to traditional aerosol graffiti all the way through the posting of images on photo sharing sites like Flickr. The introduction includes quotes from several sticker artists such as C.DAMAGE, OVERCONSUME, STAIN, COSBE, GET2, and FAUST sharing their thoughts on stickers as a medium. I would have liked to have had more words from even more artists interspersed throughout but as a primer on the subject the book does a great job of introducing mailing label art.

One of the first things I noticed about the book is its smaller size, which is perfectly fitting for the subject matter. The experience of holding the book in one hand and initially flipping through its square, colorful, matte pages with the other reminded me of what I like about holding a stack of stickers and going through them one by one. Through Cooper’s beautiful photography the book surveys the gamut of techniques and subject matter from hand-drawn characters and tagged handstyles to laser printed booty girls (with barcoded butts!) to multi-layer stencils to political and social messages. Her photographs present the labels in all their adhesive glory in various stages of their lives on the street from freshly slapped and sharp-cornered to heavily weathered, crackled, faded, torn, and peeling. As GET2 put it, “Seeing a hand drawn sticker is an experience,” and flipping though Going Postal is a lot like the experience of walking down an average city street minus all the visual noise and other distractions that might cause you to miss all the good stickers.

In general postal stickers are miniature works of art that can be enjoyed quickly and without a great deal of effort or investment on the part of the viewer, and this book does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the medium. In her own words, “looking for stickers is an on-going treasure hunt”, and Going Postal is Martha Cooper’s way of sharing the wealth. Thanks, Martha!

Order Going Postal

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.