LL Cool J Cut Creator and Brian Latture, New York City, 1987
July 20, 2024
British Journal of Photography
by Sarah Moroz
New York hip-hop, Sade and André 3000 – before the Paparazzi descended
A new retrospective showcases the career of Janette Beckman, who documented youth subcultures from punk to hip-hop through to today’s street activism
Born in London in 1959, Janette Beckman photographed the underground punk scene in real time, documenting the likes of The Clash, Sex Pistols and The Jam for music magazines such as The Face and Melody Maker, before moving to New York in 1983. There she continued to photograph emerging musicians and cultural movements, shooting unvarnished portraits of key figures in the nascent hip-hop scene, including Salt-N-Pepa, Slick Rick and LL Cool J.
She also listened to a lot of good tunes. “I think if you are photographing a musician you should listen to their music, get a sense of what they are trying to say,” she explains. “I like to talk with the artist before I photograph them. I’m trying to capture them at that moment in time, their style and attitude are always important.”
“I have always been attracted to cultures and people who are passionate about doing things their own way, regardless of society rules”
Beckman says she was lucky to photograph now-famous artists at the beginning of their careers, in an era before the influx of stylists, art directors and managers who now closely guard musicians. In Beckman’s heyday, it was just her and the people she was photographing, messing around. She also says 1980s New York City had a palpable energy and excitement, although many there had very limited means. “It was a dangerous city – drugs, unemployment, homeless folk, the gap between the haves and the have-nots – but out of this came hip-hop culture, art, music, poetry, breakdancing, street style and so much more,” she points out.
“Nowadays photographing a celebrity is a lot more complicated,” she continues. “You have to go through press agents, managers and lawyers. The artists want their own team of hair, makeup, stylists, and the right to edit and retain all rights to the images.”
Beckman now has an exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam, her first large-scale retrospective, and it showcases her zeitgeisty images of unmanicured stars – a ponytailed Sade in a fringed jacket leaning on a police vehicle in 1983, or André 3000 showing off his arm tattoos, wearing a fur hat and high- waisted trousers in 2003. The full exhibition title is Rebels: An Ode to Subversives, Revolutionaries and Provocateurs and both it and the images on show draw on Beckman’s 240-page monograph Rebels: From Punk to Dior, published in 2021.
“I worked on that book during the pandemic lockdown, printing out photos from my archive between 1976 and 2022, and pasting them on the walls of my studio,” Beckman notes. “With the help of several great trusted friends – art directors, artists, photographers – I made an edit.”
Foam curator Aya Musa went back to Beckman’s archive to create the show, casting a fresh eye on the work and going beyond celebrity portraits to include more off-the-grid images. The exhibition includes Beckman’s El Hoyo Maravilla east LA gang series, for example, an understated look at a Californian community in the early 1980s; and it features Go Hard Boyz dirt-bike riders in New York’s Harlem and the Bronx, all dark denim vests and wild moves with tyres flung mid-air.
Rebels also highlights more recent street photography tied to social justice and political activism, including people in Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests. Completing the loop, there is street style and work for fashion brands such as Dior, Levi’s, and a shoot on brownstone steps for a Gucci × Dapper Dan campaign in 2017, when the Italian label collaborated with the Harlem-born designer.
“I have always been attracted to cultures and people who are passionate about doing things their own way, regardless of society rules,” says Beckman. It is a creative independence that applies to her as well as her subjects. The images in the exhibition span over 45 years but, as she points out, her approach has remained the same throughout. “My portraits are a collaboration between me and the subject,” she says. “It’s important to treat people with respect and gain their trust.”