Janette Beckman

Janette Beckman is a British documentary photographer who has worked in London, New York and Los Angeles. Beckman describes herself as a documentary photographer. While she produces a lot of work on location (such as the cover of The Police album Zenyatta Mondatta, taken in the middle of a forest in the Netherlands), she is also a studio portrait photographer. Her work has appeared on records for the major labels, and in magazines including Esquire, Rolling Stone, Glamour, Italian Vogue, The Times, Newsweek, Jalouse, Mojo and others.

Beckman attended King Alfred School in Golders Green, north London from 1953 to 1967. She spent a year at Saint Martin's School of Art, and then three years at London College of Communication studying photography.

After initially working for Sounds magazine with Vivien Goldman – her first shoot was with Siouxsie and the Banshees – she had a job shooting for music magazines such as Melody Maker and The Face, with a studio and darkroom in central London. Her primary focus was the UK's burgeoning punk subculture. Beckman relocated to New York City in 1982 and continued her career, shooting for her UK clients as well as new ones in the U.S.

Upon arriving in New York, Beckman presented her portfolio to American record companies looking for work shooting album covers, but the gritty feel of her work did not fit the "airbrushed" aesthetic preferred at the time. She was passed on to smaller rap and hip-hop labels, where she photographed acts such as Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys in their early days. In a 2015 interview with American Photo magazine, she recalled "It is amazing, 30 years later, people going 'oh you photographed legends.' I guess I did, but they weren’t legends when I was taking pictures of them".

In August 2010 Beckman produced an exhibition entitled Archive of Attitude at Arkitip's Project Space, Los Angeles, which included "works from her time in London during the punk era through the hip-hop decade in New York and Los Angeles". Arkitip published a supplement to the show in the form of a broadsheet newspaper full of Beckman's photographs. That same month photographer Jill Furmanovsky chose Beckman's Paul Weller and Pete Townsend as one of her personal favourite music photographs for an article with NME.

In March 2011 the Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York City opened an exhibition at their Bowery location titled Catch the Beat: The Roots of Punk and Hip Hop, a joint exhibition of photographs by Beckman and photographer David Corio. In a recording of Beckman working on the streets of Harlem, her photograph of LL Cool J with his boom box is described as hip-hop history, known around the world.

In July 2011, Flavorwire named Beckman one of "10 Rock Photographers You Should Know". In the same month, Beckman launched "Archive of Attitude", a blog recounting the stories behind the photographs.

In March highlights her current advertising campaign was for Kangol, her third lookbook for the music-friendly headwear company.