The woman who defined 80s Hip Hop photography

One day in 1978, British photographer Janette Beckman got a call from Michael Ross, art director of A&M: the label had signed a new band called The Police and they wanted her to shoot the cover for their debut album, Outlandos d'Amour.

Beckman, Ross, and the band went alone into a tunnel under the Hayward Gallery on Southbank in central London on a chilly day that spring. “I scraped all my pennies together and bought a Hasselblad camera,” Beckman recalls. “I had never used one before and managed to figure it out.”

That DIY attitude would take Beckman the distance. The Police came out guns blazing with “Roxanne” and shot up the charts. Beckman remembers seeing her photograph emblazoned across the fabled billboard outside Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was an auspicious sign of things to come.

With the new exhibition, Janette Beckman – Rebels: An Ode to Subversives, Revolutionaries and Provocateurs, the photographer looks back at four decades behind the lens, crafting an archive of attitude born of her love for innovators, iconclasts, and free spirits. Blessed with a laid back persona, an eye for style, and a genuine curiosity about the world, Beckman readily moves through subcultures, taking pleasure in seeing what the new day brings.

Rebels follows Beckman from scrappy music photographer shooting underground London for Melody Maker and The Face to her move to New York in 1982, where she began working with independent hip hop labels like Def Jam, Sleeping Bag, and Next Plateau. Once again she was poised on the cutting edge, working with Hip Hop artists like Run-DMC, Salt ‘N’ Pepa, Stetsasonic, EPMD, and Gang Starr on album covers.

As the decade came to a close, Hip Hop emerged as the voice of Black America and was therefore subject to undue scrutiny, controversy, and attack. From the Congressional hearings organised by the Parents Music Resource Center calling for censorship to the FBI’s letter to Priority Records about N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” — the establishment did everything in its power to shut Hip Hop down.

But Hip Hop was by the people, for the people and it could not be stopped. Founding Def Jam publicist Bill Adler, who organized the 1989 boycott of the Grammys by Hip Hop artists, partnered with Beckman to create Rap: Portraits and Lyrics of a Generation of Black Rockers, the very first photography book dedicated to rap music.

Together they brought together the East and the West Coasts in an ode to music, art, and style. They planned to have Slick Rick on the cover until the Bronx rapper was sentenced to prison for attempted murder shortly before the book was released. The publisher insisted they change the cover; Beckman and Adler decided Big Daddy Kane was the man to get the job done.

“He just had it. He came to the studio, and he knew how to pose. He’s just sitting in a chair wearing a sweater and he’s got this quiet, confident energy. It was amazing,” Beckman says. “But the publisher didn’t want to promote the book. It was ahead of its time. And now if you look on Amazon, it’s selling for $100.”

Janette Beckman – Rebels: An Ode to Subversives, Revolutionaries and Provocateurs is on view through September 8 2024, at FOAM in Amsterdam.

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