There is joy, sweetness and hope in the photographs taken by Janette Beckman at the turn of the 1980s and presented in the exhibition “Rebels” at the Photography Museum Amsterdam (FOAM), from from May 10. We see the rapper LL Cool J as a teenager, proud as Artaban with his giant ghetto blaster. Or the founding member of the hip-hop group Run DMC, Jam Master Jay, with his little boy in his arms, the rapper Ice Cube, sovereign, in his neighborhood of Inglewood, in Los Angeles, or the bassist of The Clash , Paul Simonon, seized in his dressing room in a moment of melancholy fatigue.
“My superpower, announces Janette Beckman from New York, it’s about quickly gaining people’s trust. I don’t work like Annie Leibovitz, with a team, spots and complicated sets… I like daylight, I ask the models to position themselves in the place that suits them and I don’t make them pose a lot. »
This Londoner who grew up dreaming of being a painter and idealizing David Hockney discovered her vocation almost by chance, even out of spite. “I enrolled in art school to learn how to paint portraits, but I wasn’t good enough. » She tries her hand at photography, in square format. She met her first success in 1979: in the street, she came across some well-dressed black twins. Taken on the spot, the named image The Islington Twins establishes her as a young portraitist to follow.
“A woman, white, not very intimidating”
Engaged by Melody Maker And The Face, the two most influential magazines on the British cultural scene, she immortalizes Boy George, the singer of Culture Club, and Debbie Harry, of Blondie, or the groups The Clash and The Specials. In 1983, she moved to New York and followed in the footsteps of another emerging counterculture: hip-hop. “I’m a woman, white, not very intimidating, with this English accent… Everyone was immediately very cool with me,” she remembers. “Protected by [s]we are ignorant”, she photographed the characters of an East LA gang or went to meet the members of Run DMC in Queens, a very dangerous neighborhood at the time.
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Janette Beckman set out with the conviction that these new musical genres had “the power to change everything”. Insatiable, she has, in recent years, followed the demonstrations of the African-American activist movement Black Lives Matter, while rejoicing that her archives are recognized as the testimony of a bygone era. “I photographed Ice Cube in front of his mother’s house, Boy George on the street… If I was sent to photograph Beyoncé today, she would have her team with her and control every image. »
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