Martha Cooper's Photography Captures a Bygone Era of New York City Street Play

In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, photographers for the New York Post were sent scuttling around the city, loaded down with rolls of film, to look for a lot of different things: politics, sport, sometimes art, and, because it was the Post, mostly crime and celebrity.

Photojournalists worked out of their cars, and, at the end of the day, brought their film back to the office to be developed under the eye of the photo editor at the time, a hard-nosed woman named Susan Welchman.

In between assignments, they tried to take what were called weather shots, which were typically photos