There's joy, sweetness and hope in the photographs taken by Janette Beckman at the turn of the 1980s and presented in the "Rebels" exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum of Photography (FOAM), which opens on May 10. The rapper LL Cool J appears as a teenager, proud as could be with his giant ghetto blaster. The founding member of hip-hop group Run DMC, Jam Master Jay, with his little boy in his arms; rapper Ice Cube, sovereign, in his Inglewood neighborhood of Los Angeles; and The Clash bassist Paul Simonon, captured in his dressing room in a moment of melancholy fatigue.

"My superpower," Beckman said from New York, "is to gain people's trust quickly. I don't work like Annie Leibovitz, with a crew, spotlights and complicated sets... I like daylight, I ask the models to stand where it suits them and I don't make them pose much."

This Londoner, who grew up dreaming of being a painter and idealized David Hockney, discovered her vocation almost by chance, if not out of spite. "I enrolled in art school to learn to paint portraits, but I wasn't good enough." She tried her hand at photography, in square format. Her first success came in 1979, when she came across a pair of sharply dressed Black twins on the street. Caught on the spot, the image named "The Islington Twins" established her as a young portrait artist to watch.

'A woman, White, not very intimidating'

Hired by Melody Maker and The Face, the two most influential magazines on the British cultural scene, she immortalized Boy George, lead singer of Culture Club, and Debbie Harry of Blondie, as well as the bands The Clash and The Specials. In 1983, she moved to New York and set off in the footsteps of another burgeoning counter-culture: hip-hop. "I'm a woman, White, not very intimidating, with this English accent... Everyone was immediately very cool with me," she recalled. "Protected by [her] ignorance," she photographed the characters of an East LA gang and went to meet the members of Run DMC in Queens, a very dangerous neighborhood at the time.

Beckman set out with the conviction that these new musical genres had "the power to change everything." In recent years, she has followed the protests of the African American activist movement Black Lives Matter, and is delighted that her archives are recognized as a testimony to a bygone era. "I've photographed Ice Cube outside his mother's house, Boy George on the street... If I were sent to photograph Beyoncé today, she'd have her team with her and control every image."

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