Janette Beckman on shooting rebels before they were icons

The photographs Janette Beckman made were not supposed to last. They were assignment work, street portraits, quick sessions with artists nobody had heard of yet and kids on the streets of London in ripped clothes and safety pins. Four decades later, 700 of those images are the centerpiece of Rebels & Icons  at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.

Did you know, when you were shooting punk in London and then landing in New York as hip-hop was taking off, that you were witnessing history?

No, not at all. I went to photo school for three years. I came out and punk was just starting to happen. I was teaching at Kingsway Princeton College of Further Education. Johnny Rotten had just left, but he wasn’t Johnny Rotten then, he was just a kid.

I came out at lunchtime from college and I saw these identical twins, Chuka and Dubem Okonkwo, the Islington twins. I had my Rolleiflex camera. I went up to them, and I was kind of shy. I was like, can I take a picture of you? It turned out we lived three doors away from each other in Islington. That was my first really serious street portrait.

Soon after that, I walked into a weekly newspaper called Sounds with my portfolio. I didn’t have any music pictures whatsoever. I met a woman called Vivien Goldman, an editor and a writer. She said, “I like your pictures, why don’t you go photograph Siouxsie and the Banshees tonight?” I’d never photographed a musician before. Somehow I figured it out. 

I had a little darkroom, went back that night, developed my film, made prints, went back and showed them to her. She said, “these are good!” She gave me another job. After a bit, I went to work for Melody Maker. I was the second photographer there. 

These bands weren’t famous, so we didn’t know what it was going to become. I was an art school kid, so for me, they were rebels, they were doing something different, they had cool styles.

You photographed Run-D.M.C., Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J and so many others. How did you get people to open up to you?

It’s kind of my superpower, because I’m shy, but I’m chatty. In 1982, I saw the first hip-hop concert to come to London. It was the New York City Rap Tour. I photographed Afrika Bambaataa, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Dondi, all these icons. A couple of months later, I went to stay in New York with a friend for Christmas, and hip-hop was happening all around.

When I was in New York, I’d go out to the Bronx to photograph Boogie Down Productions, and they’d be like, you ain’t from here. I’d say, “no, I’m from London, ” and then it would start a conversation. I was a young woman, just really curious and eager to learn about their lifestyles.

In 1983, in LA, I went to photograph an East LA gang called the Hoyo-Maravilla, just because I’d read about them in a local paper and there were no pictures. I got the journalist to take me there and spent a whole summer standing in this park, waiting for people to come. I’d say, “I’m from London, I photographed all these punks, here’s pictures of them, I want to photograph you.” 

And people have just always been nice to me. Those guys took me in, they took me to meet their grandmas, showed me their lifestyles. Years later, one of the girls I photographed got back in touch. She told me, apparently, like, 90% of the people in my little book were either dead or in jail. 

Three women in one picture survived. One worked for the DA’s office, one worked in Homeboy rehabilitation. I think part of my thing is I don’t really think about it too much. I just go do it. These girls told me, we heard there was this crazy English lady hanging out in our park, so we thought we’d drive down there and take a look. I was just not aware of the danger. I didn’t research it, people told me not to go, I went anyway.

You were inside both punk and hip-hop when most people were not paying attention to either. What do those two worlds have in common that most people still miss?

When punk was happening, England was in a terrible state. We had Thatcher, all the social services were being taken away, there was huge unemployment. When Johnny Rotten sang “No Future,” there really was no future for people. Kids were rebelling, fed up with the royal family, fed up with the government.

Then I came to America, and it was the same thing. New York was broke, the Bronx was on fire. But people make the best out of what they’ve got. Back in the punk days, we were getting stuff from yard sales. There was none of this spending money on clothing. Then when I came here, there was Dapper Dan, who clothed everybody in the hip-hop world. People wanted to wear Gucci and couldn’t afford it, so he made his own Gucci fabric up in Harlem. 

He clothed Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, pretty much everybody I photographed. People find ways to make the best of bad times, and I think it makes people incredibly creative. That’s kind of the similarity, really. It makes culture.

You were shooting on film, in low light, in fast-moving spaces, without the ability to check your work on a screen. What did that way of working teach you?

When you work with film, every roll costs money, and we didn’t have any money. You have to buy the film, take the pictures, develop them, make the prints. It makes you really careful and makes you look more carefully, because you only have, say, five rolls of film, and at best it’s only got 12 shots on it. That’s 60 pictures. It’s not like these days. 

I had a Hasselblad camera with a Polaroid back, so you could take a Polaroid to do a lighting test. I actually have a lot of Polaroids signed by Run-D.M.C., which is really cool. What I would do is take the Polaroid and show it to them, let’s say it’s Salt-N-Pepa, they’d look at it and say, “this looks good,” and then we’d go take the pictures. That’s how we managed.

Four decades of your work will be on those walls at MOPOP. What are you most excited for people to see?

I haven’t actually seen the exhibition yet, but it’s apparently got 700 of my photos in it, which is insane. On the other hand, I’ve been taking photos for 40+ years, so I guess it’s not that much. I’m excited for people to see and learn how music and street youth culture builds culture and fashion and all the things that we care about, and it all comes from the street.

There’s a big section called Streets, pretty much all my street portraits. I’ve been doing them since the 90s and they’ve never been shown before. There’s another section about activism. I’ve been photographing protests since Rock Against Racism in 1980. During the pandemic, I was out doing Black Lives Matter, recording history, and I’m still doing it.

I did a big project to get out the vote, the last election. We went to swing states, set up a little blanket in the Greyhound bus station in Jacksonville, registered people to vote, worked with local churches and community centers. Those portraits have never been seen. They’ve blown them up life-size, so people are going to be able to walk in and out and meet these people. It’s a lot. It’s basically my life, and it’s a little scary to think that it’s all going to be out on display. I think it’ll be good!

Rebels & Icons  opens May 15 at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. The exhibition spans 6,000 square feet and runs for 16 months. Follow Janette Beckman on Instagram at @janettephoto.