2024 Inspo: Find Your Tribe
5 questions with the woman behind hip-hop's most iconic photos, Janette Beckman.
"No burnout here,” documentary photographer Janette Beckman told me the last week of 2023. “I live in NYC where you can always find something to photograph.”
For more than four decades, Janette Beckman has been capturing era-defining photographs of the artists, brands, creators, and game-changers that have shaped music, fashion, and street culture as we know it.
London-born Beckman started her career in the late 1970s as a documentary photographer covering the UK punk rock, alternative pop, and new wave music scenes for one of the world’s earliest music weeklies, Melody Maker, and British music, fashion, and culture magazine, The Face.
In 1983 she moved to New York where she played an instrumental role in introducing hip-hop artists to popular culture through her photographs. Beckman’s storied archive is packed with some of the earliest and most celebrated photos of today’s hip-hop icons.
One of the highlights of last year for me was getting to hear Beckman speak at my alma mater, The Fashion Institute of Technology, about her monograph, REBELS: From Punk to Dior. Her infectious passion for storytelling through photography has stayed with me ever since.
Shortly before the new year, I connected with Beckman for a brief interview about New Year resolutions (spoiler alert: it’s not her thing), upcoming exhibitions, and her favorite memory from 2023.
Mixed Prints: Before we get into 2024…2023 was a big year for hip-hop with the 50th anniversary! Do you have a favorite memory from the 50th-anniversary celebrations?
Janette Beckman: Yes! Photoville* in Brooklyn installed 15 hip-hop portraits of mine—all 8 feet tall—in storefront windows at the Seaport. We hosted block parties there with DJ Misbehaviour and Operator EMZ so there were people from all over the city dancing on the street in front of my photographs.
*Photoville is a New York-based non-profit organization that works to increase access to the art of photography for all.
MP: What’s your energy around setting New Year resolutions? Do you have one?
JB: I don't make resolutions other than to take more photos and have folks see my art. I want to keep working on my archive.
MP: What are you most excited about for 2024?
JB: My collaboration with Tees4Togo, a t-shirt company by Kathleen Hanna in partnership with Peace Sisters to support girls’ education in Togo, West Africa. I'm also super excited about an exhibition for REBELS happening in Amsterdam in May. And I’m hoping to teach a summer class, making a “Portrait of New York City.”
And, we need to use our tools to get out and vote this year.
MP: What's one thing you discovered in 2023 that you'd like to carry with you into 2024?
JB: Go out and meet people, and share your work. You never know where it might lead you.
MP: A new year can inspire new passions. If someone is just starting to take photographs…just starting to write songs…just starting to create work, what’s one piece of creative advice you’d share?
JB: In May of last year at Fotografiska, I was on a Women in Hip Hop panel with Academy Award-nominated & Emmy-winning producer and director Lisa Cortes (former president of Def Jam Records), designer and founder of Walker Wear April Walker, and one of the founding mothers of hip-hop, MC Debbie D, and we came up with this advice:
Find your tribe. Follow your north star. Be persistent.
To purchase Janette Beckman’s prints, and stay in the know about upcoming events, visit her website. Follow her on Instagram at @janettephoto.