There is something deeply fitting about Janette Beckman’s Punk Is an Attitude being presented in New York at Atelier Jolie, at 57 Great Jones Street. Just a few steps from what was once CBGB, in the heart of the East Village, Beckman’s photographs bring back to life a time when music was not simply music, but a way of being in the world. The exhibition, opening on September 1 and running through September 12, brings together images created through Beckman’s direct encounters with the British punk scene.
Beckman entered the punk world when everything was still taking shape. Working for The Face and Melody Maker, she went into clubs, photographed bands and audiences, and observed up close a generation that had no interest in asking for permission. Her photographs capture The Clash, Boy George, Siouxsie Sioux, Paul Weller and many others, but above all they capture the human substance of the movement: the clothes, the stares, the anger, the irony, the theatricality, and the almost physical sense of freedom that punk transformed into a language of its own.
The title of the exhibition is therefore more than a definition. Punk Is an Attitude suggests that punk does not belong solely to a musical genre or a particular historical moment. It is an attitude, a form of resistance, the ability to question what appears immutable. And this is precisely the thread that runs through Beckman’s entire career.
Her gaze did not stop in London. In 1983, the photographer moved to New York and began documenting the emerging hip-hop culture, photographing pioneers such as Run-DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Slick Rick, LL Cool J and Grandmaster Flash. Two seemingly distant scenes that Beckman recognised instead as expressions of the same urgency: the need to create an identity outside the dominant codes.
This continuity makes the connection with Rebels: From Punk to Dior, the major monograph published by Drago in 2021, almost inevitable. The book spans four decades of photography, bringing together music, subcultures, street culture, fashion and popular culture—from London punk to New York hip-hop and eventually to Beckman’s collaboration with Dior.
Rebels does not present the journey from rebellion to fashion as a contradiction. On the contrary, it shows how a language born on the margins can enter mainstream culture without necessarily losing its power. Beckman photographed that transformation from within, at a time when no one could yet know where it would lead.
Perhaps this is her most important quality: she does not simply photograph rebels; she recognis es rebellion at the moment it is born. Her images are not relics of a lost past. They continue to speak to us because they capture something that belongs not only to punk, but to the present: the need to invent an identity, occupy a space, and declare, even before words, “I am here.”
In this sense, Punk Is an Attitude is also a statement of method. For Janette Beckman, photography means standing on the side of the street, listening to what is happening before it becomes history, and turning a moment of freedom into memory.
