street art - book - 2008 - Going Postal: Mailing Label Street Art

Going Postal: Mailing Label Street Art
Martha Cooper
Mark Batty Publisher
2008
99 pages

Martha Cooper is a photographer with a long-standing interest in urban culture and particularly in graffiti art.  Her work has been published in a variety of periodical publications (including National Geographic) and of her books, almost all relate to hip-hop culture and most of those pertain to graffiti, including her most famous work, Subway Art (published in 1984).  She was also interviewed by Cedar Lewisohn in Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, and is generally considered a pioneer in the representation of graffiti art.

One of Cooper’s talents has been to identify types of street art and capture as many different photographic representations of this type as she can.  Books like Subway Art are categorical archives of a peculiar graffiti form, and within this form sub-categories are perceived.  Cooper’s influence can be seen in books like Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco, where the author aggregates as many examples of one particular form into a single volume.  The graffiti form Cooper collected into the book Going Postal is the mailing label image.  Street artists use labels of various sizes as a medium to carry their art.  Many of the label-works are writer’s tags, drawings-by-hand, and some are printed images.  The obvious advantage of the use of the mailing label is that the act of creation is separated from the act of vandalism, thereby reducing risk of detection to the artist.  The other advantage is that the United States Postal Service gives away its labels for free.

Going Postal contains hundreds of photos of mailing label graffiti in its 99 pages.  After a brief introductory essay by the author, in which she describes her discovery of sticker art and her apprehension of different forms of its content, the book is devoted strictly to images.  Cooper does contain numerous examples of each kind of content, from tags to amusing drawings, to political messages.  These images are not grouped in any way and aside from a list of credits at the end of the book, there is very little information attached to the works.  A reader may begin to take for granted that the images are all from the United States because USPS logos are left exposed on many of the works, but some images are drawn on German labels too.  Cooper appears to give priority to the wide array of creative possibilities that these labels have opened for street artists.  Information such as placement locations is not included, which is typical of street art books.

Going Postal is published by Mark Batty Publisher, a recently established book publishing company that appears to routinely release new books on street art.