toy camera: Around the World

Following World War II, Ben and Harry Cooper founded Cooper’s Camera Mart in Baltimore. When Ben’s daughter, Martha, was three years old, Cooper gave her a Baby Brownie. On the weekends, he would bring her on outings sponsored by the Baltimore Camera Club. When his daughter became competent with one camera, he would give her a more advanced model.

Following college, Martha Cooper became a photojournalist. Her early pieces documented the work of Horibun I, a traditional Japanese tattooist, and the burgeoning graffiti scene in New York City. In the decades since, Cooper’s photographs have appeared in “National Geographic,” “Smithsonian,” and “Natural History” magazines, and have been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Urban Nation in Berlin, among others.

In the 1970s, Cooper also began a photographica collection with a focus on women with cameras and Kodak advertising. The collection also included postcards, valentines, snapshots, doll cameras, figures, wind-ups, play cameras, and figurines.