Photojournalist Martha Cooper has always been fearless, indefatigable, and intuitive. Now in her 80s, she is best known for her documentation of New York City’s graffiti culture of the 1970s and 1980s and, specifically, the 1984 book she co-authored, Subway Art, which became a foundational text for street art globally.

Twenty years ago, casting about for a project, she came home to Baltimore. She knew the city well. Growing up, she had been influenced by her father, who ran Cooper’s Camera Mart on Harford Road with his brother, and her mother, a Western High School English and journalism teacher. Initially, she considered the rowhouse communities of East Baltimore for her project, partly because she was taken with screen painting. (With degrees in art and anthropology, documenting subgroups has been a lifelong interest.)

Her cousin Sally, however, suggested the neighborhood where their great-grandmother and great-grandfather, rabbi Benjamin Szold, settled after emigrating from Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. In her ancestors’ once-upon-a-time stomping grounds in Southwest Baltimore—aka Sowebo—she found inspiration in children jumping up and down on a discarded mattress and kids kicking around a tin can on the streets of the struggling community.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, that’s the kind of place I’m looking for,’” recalls Cooper before a recent showing of some of that work from 2006-2016 at Zella’s Pizzeria on Hollins Street. “I didn’t spend much time looking elsewhere and then I went to this real estate agent who showed me [former City Paper photographer] John Ellsberry’s tiny little rowhouse on South Carrollton Avenue, which he had renovated nicely. I’m like, ‘Great. I’m going to buy this house and I’m going to do this project.’”

She introduced herself and her intentions at the annual Sowebo Arts & Musical Festival by offering free portraits in front of a public mural painted by artist Adam Stab (see above). And soon she began carrying her camera everywhere.

The working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood surrounding historic Hollins Market has been targeted by real estate speculators for decades. But gentrification has yet to take a firm hold. Cooper notes she never had an incident in her years prowling for pictures, but she did lose money when she resold her home.

Baltimore author and Hollins Market resident Baynard Woods curated the new exhibition at Zella’s, titled “Sowebo Streets,” which also includes neighborhood portraits from an array of local photographers like Shae McCoy, Wendel Patrick, Christian Thomas, Josh Sisk, Myles Michelin, Joshua Kittle, Cheryl Kinion, Jack Radcliffe, Mark Stephen Bugnaski, Patrick Harnett, Bridget Cimino, Dan Van Allen, and Woods.

“I live down the street and get my packages delivered here, everyone does,” Woods says. The exhibition closes April 30. (Hopes to bring the show to this year’s Sowebo Art and Music Festival in late May did not pan out.) “Zella’s owners are great. They’re immigrants. I wanted to do it for the neighborhood.”

It’s a show in a pizzeria and not Paris, which someone else of her stature might dismiss, but not Cooper, adds Woods. “Martha? Right away, she said, ‘Yes.’”

Cooper is also the subject of the 2019 award-winning documentary Martha: A Picture Story, which is available to stream and includes her Sowebo experience and work.

“It was hard to describe immediately, but I what I was getting was pictures of everyday life in the streets,” Cooper says. “Simple things. Card playing. There was graffiti, a skate park, and an arabbers’ stable in the neighborhood, which was always good to photograph. Somebody kept pigeons and pigeon flying has been another interest.

“I also have a bunch of sidewalk pool scenes, one with a big inflatable sliding board in a tight alley,” she adds with a contagious smile. “I mean, I could do a whole zine of sidewalk pools.”

After a 2012 artist residency in South Africa, Cooper paired some Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in the Soweto township, one of the centers of the anti-apartheid movement. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features almost interchangeable images of cookouts, storefronts, children playing, rolling tires down the street, beat-up cars—even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts.

“There is a picture that I never thought was particularly anything, Baltimore kids riding in the back of a pickup truck, and it was in this small show I had in Johannesburg,” Cooper recalls. “And that was the picture people commented on because they were so surprised that white people would ride in the back of a pickup truck.

“To me, it was just two [similar] pictures. But a friend overheard those comments from the groups of Black South Africans standing around and talking about the photos. It was just the similarities of everyday life. But maybe when you put those two photos together, you find something universal. People overcoming their circumstances.”

This article first appeared in our May 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

Baltimore-based journalist and author Baynard Woods, a former City Paper editor, has written several books, among them Coffin Point: The Strange Cases of Ed McTeer, Witchdoctor Sheriff, and I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, co-authored by Brandon Soderberg. But he has never written one this personal.

His new book, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, explores his upbringing in the Deep South, as well as his family’s enslaver history. Rather than assuming the role of a reporter investigating the embedded racism of his home state, with Inheritance, Woods examines his own experience in the white culture in which he was raised, and its invisibility to him. Woods is an engaging writer and aspects of his story will resonate with anyone who has grown up in the majority-white cities, towns, and suburbs of America. Especially those who struggle with the political dynamics of family get-togethers in the era of Donald Trump.

One thing that stuck with me was the quote about how laws are made to protect some people, but not bind them—and bind other people, but not protect them.
Yeah, I was horrified to realize how much of my own psychology had been sort of framed by the slave codes of 1740 in South Carolina, which set up these two systems of law whereby white people were protected and not bound—and Black people were bound, but not protected. And how often in my life, I had expected to be protected by the law without being bound by the law.

You covered the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer was killed. Does the effectiveness of the alt-right misinformation machine surprise you?
If you really trace the rise of Trump, and this is way before January 6, it just seems [you can go back to] the Lost Cause ideology as the progenitor of alternative facts. Think about how soon we first started hearing that phrase from the Trump Administration.

A major thread revolves around your great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran and state legislator, who was involved in the assassination of a Black man. And possibly, the rape of a young enslaved woman, with whom there is some evidence he may have had a child, or children.
I haven’t been able to pin it down for sure, but it wouldn’t have been unusual, to say the least. It was part of the economy. Rape enriched the rapist. There are Black families with the name Woods and McFadden [another family name]. With Ancestry.com and DNA, my uncle learned we have Black cousins in New York and several places, including Maryland.

Not being from the Deep South, it’s hard to get a feel for white culture there—the primacy of the Confederate flag, for instance—and the sense of aggrievement many white people experience there.
The civil rights movement was turbulent for white people. My parents, for example, grew up when every door they walked through was marked “white.” People have been filled with this either anger—for their privilege being taken away—or shame of having lived in an apartheid regime their entire life. I think that’s what Trump, Reagan, and so many others plugged into. My dad came of age right as the civil rights movement happened. This was an apartheid world that he had been raised to think was his right and it crumbled in front of him. And then it was just like, “Oh well, we’re just not going to talk about that anymore.” I think that did something psychologically to him.

You struggle with your father’s support for Donald Trump, especially toward the end when he’s dying from ALS.
Many times I liked him, and I always loved him. He had a lot of good qualities, and he had a lot of failings. I think that’s the question we have to deal with as white people. How do we deal with our family when they’re wrong? I see people saying, “If you’re white and you’re an ally, and you don’t talk to your family [about race], you’re not really an ally.” I don’t think that’s right. It’s not about purity or something like that. But I also don’t have a good answer, which is why I wrote the book. Eventually, I just played defense and quit trying to convince my dad.

If Baltimoreans perceive the Baltimore Police Department’s now infamous Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) as simply a bunch of bad apples skimming money and drugs, Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg set the record straight in their book, I Got a Monster (St. Martin’s Press), which is slated for a release on July 21. The crimes committed by the plainclothes unit, reconstructed here in stunning narrative detail, were part of an organized conspiracy of thievery, thuggery, and drug dealing.

The book’s title comes from sergeant Wayne Jenkins’ nickname for a big-time target—not to arrest, but as a potentially lucrative score for him and his crew. In the end, “monster” becomes an apt description of Jenkins, in particular, and the other six members of the Gun Trace Task Force, whom readers see prowling the city they have sworn to protect. Based on painstaking reporting culled from wiretapped conversations, jailhouse calls, body-camera and surveillance footage, court transcripts, and hundreds of interviews, it’s not just a must-read—it’s a page turner.

You both do an incredible job reconstructing the crimes of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF). Why was it important to get the details down in print?

Baynard Woods: A lot of the details of GTTF corruption came out in the federal trial of the two former detectives who didn’t plead guilty—but those details came out piecemeal in testimony. We saw an immediate value in placing the events in chronological order so readers could [learn] something not only about their crimes but also about the context in which they took place—and [about] the human condition.

Do you think Baltimoreans realize this wasn’t just a group of corrupt cops, but a gang of violent criminals operating with impunity?

BW: One of the things we’ve learned over the past few years is that, yes, a lot of Baltimoreans knew this. They have been claiming that “BPD is a gang” for years. It’s mainly that white and middle-class Baltimore hasn’t taken those claims seriously. But I think everyone will be surprised at the details of their depravity.

Brandon Soderberg: The concept of “cops are a gang” is understood by plenty of people in the city, but the GTTF story really bears that out. It is not hyperbole with these guys. Actually, early on in the writing process I rewatched The Sopranos series because it helped me to think of the GTTF story as a gang/gangster story, not a police story. And these cops juggled domestic life, criminal life, and “straight” cop life so it was even more complicated for them than Tony Soprano.

How did Sgt. Wayne Jenkins and the others get away with robbing, planting evidence, and lying on affidavits for half a decade?
BW: It can’t be just a simple lack of supervision. During that time, the City was effectively waging war on its citizens. Politicians and police brass needed stats to show they were doing something about crime. Jenkins brought the stats and so, as in war, they looked the other way when he crossed the line.

BS: Jenkins and his squad gave command and other leaders in the city what they wanted: arrests, statistics. I think seizing guns and other things command could highlight and turn into good PR just made it easier to look the other way when these cops lied or stole. It’s like the locking them up was for the city, the robbing was for them. They also messed with people no one would believe: working people involved in the aboveground or underground economy. In Baltimore, those people are mostly Black and have been systematically ignored already.

In fact, the GTTF was not brought down by the Baltimore Police Department, but the DEA, correct?
BW: The U.S. Attorney’s would not have known about GTTF if the DEA had not been investigating a Black drug dealer in Northeast Baltimore. When he called Detective Momodu Gondo on a tapped phone, the feds realized there was something else happening. But it was finally the anti-corruption unit of the FBI that brought them down.

What was behind the behavior of the GTTF members? Simple greed? Power? A darker impulse?
BW: As always, people are complicated and I think everyone had their own reasons—but greed was the common denominator. For someone like Momodu Gondo, who was trying to protect his drug-dealing friends, I think loyalty was mixed with that. And for Wayne Jenkins, I think it was greed.

How does someone who didn’t grow up in, or doesn’t live in, one of the city’s chronically overpoliced neighborhoods begin to comprehend the GTTF’s calamitous impact—and general BPD behavior as documented in the DOJ investigation—on community trust of the police department?
BS: I think the easiest way to put it is that they created crime. By committing crimes themselves, but also because robbing drug dealers leads to violence (people get shot when the count isn’t right) and dealing drugs disrupts the underground economy. But also consider this: Tactics considered aggressive but still generally accepted in American policing foment chaos in communities, too. The GTTF were exceptionally bad, but we should make sure to see the GTTF as the not-that-surprising end result of decades of overpolicing.

Are you optimistic that the six-member Commission to Restore Trust in Policing, made up of lawyers, judges, and former cops, will put their finger on why and how the GTTF criminal enterprise flourished—and what can be done to make sure it never happens again?
BS: I was encouraged by the creation of the commission and it seemed to me like Senator Bill Ferguson had the right attitude. There were clear reasons why this happened and why it needs to never happen again. But the commission repeats some of the mistakes that enabled GTTF. The commission has not been transparent. It is headed by a judge, and includes three former cops, so it’s still cops investigating cops, and we know that doesn’t work. I hope that at the least we might get some public testimony out of this, which could be cathartic for the community.

The GTTF was disbanded after the federal criminal charges were brought, but plainclothes teams remain. Historically, plainclothes units have been problematic, but they have always been reconstituted, as you note in the book. Is there a better way?
BS: If we consider policing the answer to public safety at all, then plainclothes cops who are given a long leash and incentives to arrest anybody and everybody are not successful because they make the city less safe. So doing away with plainclothes policing is the beginning of a better way. Increase transparency because police understand how protected they are for sure. And divesting from law enforcement and giving more money to groups such as Safe Streets and other community-facing efforts would go a long way.

There’s also a documentary coming.
BW: As we were writing the book, we were simultaneously working with Alpine Labs, a production company, to film a documentary version, which is also called I Got a Monster. We really wouldn’t have had the time or resources to do the book right without them, and it also gave us a chance to tell the story in a different way. It was set to premiere at the Maryland Film Festival, which was postponed. We can’t wait for people to see it.

Last month, the Baltimore news world said goodbye to WEAA’s The Marc Steiner Show after 24 years. Shortly after, City Paper announced its closure at the end of the year, leaving a void for alternative news in the city.

A new nonprofit founded by two City Paper editors—Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg—along with Marc Steiner started a new affiliate based on the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ). Baltimore BINJ launched on August 11 with the introduction of an IndieGoGo crowd-funding page with a goal of $25,000 to fund local journalism projects. All donations will fund projects that will be published at existing media outlets.

While the Baltimore-based outfit isn’t directly connected to its Boston predecessor, the model and logo were borrowed with the permission of Boston’s founder Chris Faraone, who is a longtime friend of Woods. The nonprofit is operating under the fiscal sponsorship of Steiner’s Center for Emerging Media.

Woods, the editorial director for the local BINJ and editor-at-large for City Paper, said that the purpose of the organization is not meant to replace the alt-weekly or Steiner’s show, but will become a way for journalists to provide local news for residents without a connection to a corporate entity.

“It’s not a thing that’s directly affiliated with City Paper, but it’s definitely coming out of the world of alternative news weeklies,” he says. “The tagline we’re using is ‘A guerrilla newsroom raiding the ruins of corporate media.’ We’re fighting against the encroachment of media deserts here.”

With that goal in mind, to start, BINJ plans to fund three very specific projects, including working with local nonprofit Writers in Baltimore Schools to encourage students to write profiles.

 “We thought that being able to help fund the writing of young journalist in Baltimore would be something that we really want to do,” Woods says.

The other two projects include a feature on the culture of street basketball in Baltimore by Reginald Thomas—who recently chronicled Baltimore Polytechnic’s basketball season in a photo essay for City Paper—and an extremely timely investigative piece on white supremacy in law enforcement.

Multimedia journalism is also something extremely important to BINJ. So far, they have developed a daily news podcast called Baltimore Binge that is released Monday through Friday. The show provides news, hot topics, and politics in less than 15 minutes.

“We thought that there really needs to be a daily news show,” says Woods. “There was a need for something really short, ‘off the cuff,’ and as honest as possible, addressing Baltimore news each day.”

Although the nonprofit is less than a week old—and the founders are still juggling journalistic responsibilities of their day jobs—its founders have high ambitions for the future.

“We’re going to have several different meet-ups where we’ll have a lot of opportunities for people who want to be involved—writers, producers, web designers,” Woods said. “Ultimately, we would like to fund beats, a high school reporter, and even fund translation of existing stories into Spanish.”

Currently, the team is meeting with local independent news organizations that would be interested in publishing their content as they continue to raise money to fund future projects. So far, the group has raised $3,718 with 22 days left to reach its $25,000 goal.

“Someone asked the other day, ‘What if you don’t meet the goal?’” Woods says. “The answer is, ‘So what?’ At that point, we have already funded one story just by raising the first $1,000. Every new project that we can help exist is a better day in journalism than it was the day before.”