An actor, a dancer and a stage director based in Paris during the 1960s, Martine Barrat moved to New York in 1968 after an invitation from the MaMa Experimental Theater Club found by Elle Stewart. There, she created a workshop for children in the Lower East Side combining theater, video and jazz. She progressively turned towards the image – video and 16mm film – which she would eventually entirely devote herself to. In the beginning of the 1970s, she began a video series about gang members from the South Bronx, a difficult neighbourhood in which she achieved eventual acceptance. From this important documentary project, which she worked on for several years, she created You Do the Crime, You Do the Time (1978), which won best documentary prize in Milan. Fascinated by the black neighbourhood where she also photographed the streets, boxing clubs and churches, she paid tribute to its dwellers – the elderly, musicians and children – with whom she spent much time over the course of several years. The retrospective Harlem in My Heart, presented at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris from 2007–2008 revealed the beauty of these poor and flamboyant heroes.

Also celebrated for her boxing photographs, she published the book Do or Die, prefaced by director Martin Scorsese. The power of the images, the ritualistic dimension of the sport, and the brotherhood that is pierced under the violence of fighting all deserve an enthusiastic response. The intensity of her photographs lies in the eyes. “Boxing is the only sport where the opponents look at each other in the eyes,” she states. We can thus understand her attraction for violent energy, whether it be in the ring, or in the ghettos of the South Bronx and Harlem, or even the Parisian Goutte-d’Or district, where she systematically goes to photograph the neighbourhood kids when she returns to France.