Although her parents did not want her to be an artist, London nativeJanette Beckman convinced them to let her enroll on a foundation year at St. Martins School of Art in the 1970s. Once they agreed, Beckman moved to the South London neighbourhood of Streatham, where she paid£5 a week to rent a floor in a semi-squat inhabited by fellow art students.
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Her love for portraiture led her to eventually take up photography at the London College of Communication. After discovering August Sander’s seminal monograph, People of the 20th Century, in the school library, Beckman began documenting the explosion of rebel culture in a series of street portraits made across the UK.
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In Mods & Rockers Raw Streets UK 1979-1982 (Café Royal Books), Beckman takes us back to the second coming of these classic British subcultures – two groups who were, for a brief moment in time, each other’s natural enemies.
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