I have to admit that I had never encountered the work of Janette Beckman until this last week. A Brit who photographed Punk in the seventies before moving to the States (she now lives and has a studio in New York) and carried on her work with groups of people living far from ordinary lives.

It was the tension between Janette Beckman’s shyness and her curiosity about people that helped spark a career photographing subcultures. “I realised that having a camera gave you licence to go up to strangers and say, ‘Hi, I’d like to take a picture of you,’” she says. This epiphany jump-started a 45-year adventure in street photography, documenting the punk and two-tone youths of 70s Britain, the birth of hip-hop in New York, Latino gang members in Los Angeles, bikers in Harlem, rodeos, rockabilly conventions and demonstrations from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.

Beckman has a knack of prompting her subjects to bare their souls like it’s an act of defiance. “You form this intense relationship very quickly with your subjects, or that’s what I try to do,” she says. She likes to keep it simple and tries to capture her subjects between poses when they are just being themselves. Her fascination with portraiture started young. “Growing up in London,” she says, “I spent a lot of time in the National Portrait Gallery. And I would stare at people on the bus to school trying to imagine what their lives were like.”

Once she had left the London College of Printing (she left Central St Martin's Scool of Art when she realised that photography was a different way in portraiture than drawing) she started to shoot on the street. The Face, together with rival style magazine i-D, helped pioneer street style photography, and the editors gave Beckman free rein. “They would send me to an illegal boxing club in south London, or maybe some rock festival by Loch Lomond, where I could go and shoot the fans as well as the bands and they would do spreads of all the fans. That gave me licence to document all these youth cultures.”

In the early 80s, New York was recovering from near bankruptcy and undergoing an incredible cultural renaissance, from hip-hop in the Bronx to the art scene downtown. Beckman re-located in '82 and lived in Tribeca, which was then “a deserted warehouse neighbourhood”. The famous Mudd Club, where Fab 5 Freddy taught Debbie Harry how to rap, was around the corner. “It was really great,” she says. “And it was dangerous.” Naive and brazen, she would wander around the Bronx or travel to America’s west coast to loiter in LA ganglands, searching for interesting characters.  “I think I got a lot of respect, because I’m British, I’m a smallish woman with a camera, not intimidating. So people trusted me. You are really a stranger on somebody else’s turf and they somehow respect you for being there and not being scared.”

Beckman continues to follow her nose and often that takes her away from coastal cities – to the Black Bikers Club in Omaha, say, or speedway races in Indiana. In 2017, after Trump’s election, Beckman began a three-year project called I Vote Because, for which she travelled through America’s swing states taking portraits and encouraging people to register to vote. “You got incredible stories from people in five minutes,” she says. “It was a dream job.”

Her new book "Rebels, From Punk to Dior" by Jeanette Beckman is published by Drago is now on sale at €60. Her website is fun too as well as informative and you can see the whole interview from which I have cribbed this blog here. Enjoy...