Martha Cooper`s bestseller and the reference on the history of Hip Hop culture

Postal stickers have long been a preferred substrate used by street artists to get up. Of course, because stickers from the US Postal Service, UPS, DHL and FEDEX are so readily available, many of these stickers get lost in the fray. That’s where graffiti photography legend Martha Cooper comes in. Shooting the origins of hip-hop and graffiti cultures since the late 1970s in New York City, and later all over the world, Cooper’s well-trained eyes know how to recognize deft sticker art. Going Postal is a collection of more than 200 photographs of some of Cooper’s favorite handmade postal stickers from around the world, done by both better-known and anonymous artists. Going Postal documents how an old-school method has burgeoned into a rich facet of the world’s graffiti cultures.

Once, the spraycan "kings" of New York's subways astounded the world with their exuberant graffiti images. Now a new generation of artists has hit the streets and is decorating neighbourhood walls with memorials to the tragic and untimely deaths of friends and loved ones. "R.I.P." - assembling the very best of a vibrant street art wave - contains colour photographs of memorials from Harlem and the Lower East Side, the South Bronx and Brooklyn, as well as the moving stories behind them. The victims of shootings, accidents, arguments, police killings and drug-related turf wars may be gone, but thanks to these paintings they are not forgotten: for a violent and indifferent city has also spawned a rich urban art form. Martha Cooper's first book of photographs was "Subway Art" (with Henry Chalfant, Thames and Hudson, 1984).

Two gifted photographers have documented every aspect of this extraordinary urban subculture, complete with 239 full-color photographs.