The Anthropology of the Gaze: A Conversation with Martha Cooper

 

BD Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invite you to a meeting with Martha Cooper, one of the key figures in post-war documentary photography in the United States.

 

The artist will discuss the anthropological approach that has defined nearly six decades of her practice: from Tokyo Tattoo (1970), a study of traditional tattooing in the yakuza milieu, through Street Play from the late 1970s, to projects that are now entering the collections of the Library of Congress. The conversation will focus on her ethnographic method, access to hermetic worlds, and the boundaries between documentation and the co-creation of visibility. Cooper will also share her experience working at the New York Post, where in 1977 she became the first woman to hold a full-time staff photojournalist position in the newspaper’s history.

 

BD — a Warsaw-based contemporary art gallery. The gallery’s program stems from a long-standing practice of documentation, systematically accompanying visual forms that develop outside institutional circuits, generating their own structures of circulation, distribution, and criticism. At the center of the program are experimentation and the archive, treated simultaneously as creative material and a tool for recording cultural and social practices whose permanence depends on documentation.

The gallery collaborates with artists of various generations whose works lie at the intersection of painting, photography, new media, and installation. BD carries out curatorial projects in Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, and Prague.  The monographs and art books published by the gallery constitute an autonomous dimension of working with the artist and the artwork, and extend the exhibition program to include the medium of publication.