“Janette Beckman: Capturing the Spirit of the Streets”

Exhibition: Rebels + Icons: The Photography of Janette Beckman

Venue: OPOP, Museum of Pop Culture, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109
Dates: May 15, 2026 to September 8, 2027

Interview by: James Maher

Japanese translation by: Miwa Susuda

Hi, I’m Janette, welcome to my studio. I'm having a big retrospective, 40-plus years of my photography at the Museum of Pop Culture. And it's kind of crazy and intimidating, because it's my whole life basically. The show is in Seattle and opens May 15th.

It's a huge show. It's like 6,000 square feet, which I can't quite get my head around. There are different sections, so there's music and youth culture, which is punk, hip hop, and anything else that kind of comes in that category. It's not just the bands, it's the fans because I always documented the fans. I was always super interested in street style and what people were wearing. Then there's a section on fashion and style. I did campaigns for brands like Levi's and Dior, and there’s a street section. I've been doing street portraits pretty much all my life. There's a celebrity section and there's also a section called Say It Out Loud, which is about activism. I've been documenting protests since 1981, from Rock Against Racism to present day No Kings. There's probably 150 framed, exhibited pictures, but there are also these interactive screens where people can scroll through. I think there's more like 700 pictures if you include all pictures on the screens, which is wild.

Last year, they sent three curators to my house and we were sitting right here at this table for a week. I put up hundreds of photos, contact sheets, and I printed out little prints. Lots and lots of images in different sections.

It covered a whole wall, and we just sat there and edited them together. It was a great process. These people were really lovely. It was the chief curator, museum designer and the producer, and they were really strict. I mean, the one thing about working with the museum, they're not playing.

So they were here on the dot of nine, until five, and then we'd go out for dinner and it was a great process. Since then, they have all these teams. Museums have teams come to find out: this is the team for the day after, this is the team who's going to tell you what you're doing on the day, this is the team for the merchandising. I'm working with all these teams; it’s a lot of Zoom calls. The show opens May 15th. It's not just pictures on the wall. It's a lot of wheatpasting, big life-sized wall wheatpastes. A lot of graphics. They're trying to build streets so people can walk down the street and see a picture of, say, Boy George at the end of the street.

We are also making a little mini doc, like a 15-minute documentary. Me and my friend Joe did it, who used to work with Bruce Weber a long time ago, he shot it and co-directed it with me. We've interviewed a bunch of people from back in the day. We’re getting Mix Master Mike, the DJ from the Beastie Boys to do the soundtrack. Cafe Royal made these five little zines; we’re making a little box set with a signed print.

I’ve published a lot of books. The first book was in 1991, it was called Rap Portraits and Lyrics of a Generation of Black Rockers. I did it with Bill Adler, who was then director of publicity at Def Jam. So he did the writing. I had portraits of, you know, everybody, LL Cool J, Run DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, you name it. So we had a portrait and we had a lyric from a song, and Bill wrote something about each artist. We were a little ahead of our time and we couldn't get any of the big block stores to buy the book because apparently they thought it would be stolen. I did a book on punk called, Made in the UK, with Powerhouse Books in 2005. In 2008, I did a book on hip hop with Powerhouse.

In 2014, I did a project with my friend, Cey Adams, who was a graffiti artist, and the creative director at Def Jam. He had the idea that he would get his friends, the graffiti artists, to draw on my hip hop photos. The project was called The Mashup, and we actually did a little exhibition. He asked 10 of his friends and we had a little exhibition in this very space and 500 people turned up to the opening. It was nuts. So we realized we had something really cool. I'd made these 11 by 14 prints, and so we started taking the exhibition to different locations, different galleries. I took it to London, it was in Paris, it was in Geneva. And in the end, we end up making a book and having a huge show in LA. That book came out I think 2018 and then I made Rebels: from Punk to Dior, which came out during the pandemic. I managed to get these great quotes from people like Salt, from Salt-N-Pepa. The newest book is definitely the most complete of my work.

I grew up in in the suburbs of London and I always wanted to be an artist. I went to arts school. I was always drawing in the evening. I went to a lot of museums when I was a kid. My parents didn't want me to go to art school because, how are you gonna earn a living? You know, the old story.

But I persisted and I ended up going to art school and I really wanted to be a portrait painter. But in the end, I transitioned to photography. I went to photo school for three years and punk was just sort of starting to happen. One day, I walked into a music magazine called Sounds and met this woman, Vivien Goldman Moon, this famous punk writer, and she was like, “Oh, I like your pictures. Why don't you go photograph this band tonight?” I'd never photographed the band before. So I went, I took the pictures. I had a little dark room. I went back to the dark room and I developed them, came back the next day and she's like, “Oh, these are good,” and gave me another job.

I was the second photographer, because the first photographer, this guy Tommy Sheehan, was getting all the big trips, to photograph Led Zeppelin in Texas and all of that. And for me, they were like, “Oh yeah, there's a new band. They're kind of punk, you know. They're called, the Undertones. So I ended up doing all the punk stuff and I really loved it. During that time, in the late seventies, early eighties, there were so many youth cultures going on in the UK. There was punk, there was rockabilly, there was reggae, there were skinheads, there was two-tone. So I ended up documenting all of that, photographing for this weekly newspaper, two or three bands a week. It was a really great time, living in a sort of squat, my rent was $8 a week. And you know, I was just working, doing what I loved, and it was amazing.

And of course, these bands weren't really famous. They were just all up-and-coming. The fall of 1982, for the first ever hip hop show to come to the UK, it was called The New York City Rap Tour. They were like, who wants to photograph this? And I put my hand up.
I didn't know what it was. And that afternoon, the afternoon of the assignment, I went down to this kind of Airbnb behind Victoria Station. And I just met all these people; I didn't know who they were, but I was running around, you know, photographing everybody.

So I got all these pictures, and then at night I went to the show and all these people were on stage together. So it turned out that I had actually photographed Futura, Afrika Bambaataa, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew— the people who were going to be the godfathers and godmothers of hip hop culture.

About a month later, I was coming to New York to visit a friend for Christmas, and I just came here and ended up staying. There's a perennial question about who invented punk. Was it America or was it the UK? I wasn't here, so I don't know. But in my mind, it came from the UK because, you know, Britain was in a terrible state. It was broke, there were no jobs. You know, when Johnny Rotten sang No Future, that was the truth. There was no future. There were no jobs. Margaret Thatcher was in power. They were getting rid of all the social services; it was a dire time in the UK and plus, you know, we've got hundreds of years of the class system bearing down on us and we hated the monarchy, we hated the government.

We didn't have any money. So basically, you know, out of that came invention and music and protests. People weren't buying clothes made by Gucci. We didn't have money. We were dressing from yard sales and Army, Navy stores and so forth.
We had to be inventive. Even though there were all these different youth cultures and you know, the skinheads supposedly didn't like the punks, but they'd still go to the concerts. There was a thing in London, if you were part of the underground and you saw somebody of your age, there was a sort of tacit understanding that okay, you are in it. I'm in it. And you know, I was an art school person, so I was running around in my 'Fuck Art Let's Dance' Madness t-shirt with some pajama bottoms and Converse sneakers. But there was a certain element of respect that went along with that because you know, fuck the class system. In England, it's a certain thing where you stay in your lane, and we didn't want to stay in our lane. We wanted to be who we wanted to be.

And then I came here in ’83, and it was the exact same thing. New York was broke. People didn't have work, and this new group of young people were doing the exact same thing. They were making music; they were dressing with no money. Somebody like Dapper Dan, for instance, up in Harlem… people wanted to wear Gucci, but they couldn't afford it, so he made his own Gucci fabric and made his own clothes. You know, people in hard times, they somehow manage to create.

I was living in what is now Tribeca, but back then it was junkies in the alley. It was cockroaches. It was rats, but I loved it because the loft I was staying in had heat, which I didn't have in England. So that was kind of exciting.

I had this portfolio, I'd done the Police album cover, I shot the Clash, I'd shot Boy George, So I had my portfolio and I was going around to all the big record companies trying to get work. I thought people were going to give me work, but they thought my work was too messy, grubby. Hair wasn't combed. You could see people’s zits. People weren't dressed properly and they were like, “well, we have airbrushing and don't think any of musicians who work with us will want to work with you. Your stuff is too raw and gritty.” So it took a while.

But eventually they were like, well, there's this new group, there's this new thing happening, it's called rap. And there's this new rap group, the Fearless Four, you can go and do their album cover. And soon after that, the British magazines knew I was here, so they started to call me going, “Oh, there's this group Run DMC, can you go photograph them?” We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have computers. It was literally a landline. They gave me this phone number and I call up and I’m talking to Jam Master Jay's mom. Run DMC on the street where they lived, and years later it turns out to be one of my most famous pictures

We didn't have hairdressers, no styling, no art directors. It was just me, my camera, and whoever I was with. When I photographed LL Cool J with the boombox, that was his first ever press picture.. I started working for these little tiny little startup record companies like Def Jam and Sleeping Bag, and they were just sending me all their people because I was easy to work with. I got the job done.

Segueing back to what came first as far as punk, I'm not sure when the Ramones recorded their first song, and it doesn't matter to me. I feel like the direction of British punk and American punk was perhaps fueled by the drugs they were taking, and maybe the drugs here were a little stronger. In England, it was like speed and weed. New York in the 80's, they call it Hip Hop's Golden Age and maybe it was, but you know, I was seriously concentrating on just photographing the hip hop scene. And I worked for the Daily News. I had a double page fashion spread every week with my friend Ellen, who was a stylist, and that was incredible. They also had me photographing Keith Haring and Walter Mosley, all sorts of different types of people. I was working for Nickelodeon. I was working for Sesame Street. I did a lot back then, but the hip hop thing was huge.

I photographed Salt-n-Pepa for some British magazine before they even had a record out.....

I was living on Avenue B at the time, and we just spent an afternoon on a hot summer’s day taking pictures in the neighborhood. There were murals all over the place and they were like, “Oh, I think we're gonna have a record coming out. Would you, could you do our record cover?” I ended up doing record covers for their manager, Hurbie 'Luv Bug' Azor, who managed a lot of artists. I shot a big portrait of him with all his artists for the Daily News Magazine, for a story about him, which I pitched to them. They were always asking me for ideas, so that was cool.

I was working for these small record labels like Sleeping Bag and Def Jam and they pretty much sent me everybody, because I had a little studio on Lafayette Street. You'd go outside and there was graffiti everywhere. So I had wallpaper for my photos. It was pretty great. And then we'd go to the Jones Diner and get a burger. It just was a really nice lifestyle, you know? And then you'd go out at night to clubs, like Area and the Palladium. Because I was living in the East Village, there were all these little art galleries opening, so we’d go to art openings. It was a great time to be in New York. It was so culturally vibrant for me as a Brit, and I'd been so used to this class system and everything. I was totally accepted. A lot of people ask me, what was it like for you as a White woman going to the Bronx to photograph? And honestly, it was amazing. Everybody in the hip hop world was so nice to me. They literally were like, “Where you from? Oh, what's London like?” And we'd start having a conversation and get my portrait. N.W.A. and Public Enemy, all super nice people. Which is interesting, because I was often working for these British magazines that nobody had ever heard of or seen. The Face was expensive. Nobody in the Bronx was going to go and buy the Face. But they were all at the start of their careers and I think they were just happy to have somebody interested in them. And I'd be working with writers, so they'd get interviewed.

We didn't know what it was going to be. That is really the big thing. And it's the same with the whole punk thing. Like when I took that picture of Boy George, the one right behind me. That was the week before his first single went to number one. Nobody knew Boy George. I was friends with him because we came from the same neighborhood. And he's just sitting on the sidewalk outside his record company, head to toe in Vivienne Westwood. I really love that picture, but you know, he wasn't a big superstar. Everybody knew him on the street, but in England, things happen really quickly. It can take a week and suddenly your record is at number one. I felt the same way when I came here. It was a culture that was marinating. I think we were just excited. I mean, we had to have enough money to eat, and pay rent, but it wasn't really about the money. It wasn't like Madonna was hiring me for $20,000. I was not getting those shoots at all. It was only much later that, you know, somebody like Levi's would come along. People were writing songs about their lives. And it was the same with punk.

I was living on Avenue B. I'd come into the studio and swing by Tower Records across the street to see if any of my record covers were in the window. In 1988 when the Tompkins Square Park riots erupted outside my apartment the neighborhood was crazy. I lived on an Avenue B, all that time. I never had anything happen to me. I was walking around with a camera and nobody bothered me. I then had to move out of the apartment I was living in. So me and my boyfriend at the time found this place on Bond Street. It was a crack street. There were a lot of homeless people. There were two parking garages, there was a lumber yard, a plumbing supply. It was an industrial street and I really liked that about it. And, we got this apartment, but it was illegal to live in the building, but we didn't care. Everybody's like, “You're crazy, why are you moving into this illegal building?”

But it was a building full of artists and we just stuck it out. Eventually we got our certificate of occupancy, and it worked perfectly because it's a floor through loft and I have my studio in the front. I live in the back, and it turned out to be the perfect space for us.

Pretty much everything else around here is renovated and everybody comes here and goes, “Oh, it's the last artist loft on the block.” There are a couple over there too, but it's a great little block because it's right in the middle of the East Village and the West Village.

I try to capture people's spirit. It's kind of like my superpower because I'm really not a tech photographer. I mean, obviously I've done big shoots for brands where I've had to rent studios and have assistants, but my superpower is really making people feel at ease and letting them be themselves. And I'm quite chatty, so that seems to work. I was very shy as a kid and somehow having a camera has enabled me to go up to people and talk to them and learn about them.

I teach a street portrait class for the School of Visual Arts for eight weeks, and we go out on the street to a different neighborhood in New York every week. I'm trying to teach people who've maybe never taken a portrait before, how to go up to a complete stranger on the street. They're all ages, 18 to 60. My philosophy is to be polite, be kind, be respectful, and say thank you. That's all you really need. You can go up to somebody on the street and go, “I love your hat,” and they feel special. Then we take a quick portrait. And we make a zine at the end of the class.

It’s documenting what's going on, sort of what I've done all my life out on the street, documenting street style and street culture. I recently had to write an artist statement for my catalog and I wrote something… It's almost like between a breath. You’re talking to them and while they're thinking about a pose, you take that picture. And then they do the pose.

And you check your ego at the door, because obviously the subject—I think, Gordon Park said this—the subject is way more important than the photographer. Some photographers forget that.

I'd like to finish by talking about this project, El Hoyo Maravilla, that I made with Dashwood—it’s something between a book and a zine. We made this in 2011. It's about a project that I did about an East LA gang. In 1983, I spent the summer in LA and I found out about this gang. I spent the summer going back and forth to this very dangerous neighborhood. Everybody told me not to go, but I was really fascinated by them. I'd just go there every day and hang out in the park, and take portraits of people. I could not get this published in 1983; nobody was interested. I had writing, I had everything. And then David at Dashwood in 2011 asked, “Is there a project you have that never got published?” He looked at it, he loved it.

So we published it, and one of the women in one of the pictures got in touch with me and said that 90% of the people in this book were either dead or in jail. And these three friends had stayed in touch and they were still best friends. So I went to LA and met them and we just told stories. They have managed to survive. They still live in the neighborhood. They've got children and grandchildren. They kept their kids out of gangs.

One of them works for the DA's office. One of them works in rehabilitation, keeping people out of gangs, and one works in human resources and drives a Mercedes. They've all done really well and it was just amazing to meet them. And now when I have shows in LA, they come and they bring their grandkids. They're the stars of the show as far as I'm concerned. It was a beautiful project.