In 1983 while spending the summer in Los Angeles I read about the ‘Hoyo Maravilla’ street gang in a local paper. Fascinated I found the writer and he introduced me to them. Every day I’d drive out to the Hoyo Maravilla Park in East LA with my camera, waiting to see who came by. I began making portraits of the gang members posing in front of graffiti covered walls with their tags, they explained that the HM gang code is based on respect and reputation for its members and invited me home to meet their grandmothers. 

One day I photographed three young women standing in front of their car, the ‘Rivera Bad Girls’: La China, Yogi and Lil Giggles (aka Norma Vicki and Vivien) – they had so much style and attitude.Thirty years later we met at the Homeboy Cafe in East LA and they told me about the 1980’s gang wars, and that ninety per cent of the people in my photographs were dead or in jail. The girls had come to the park that day as they had heard that ‘there was some crazy English woman taking photos’ These women still live in the old neighbourhood, best friends with great jobs, having brought up families and made it out of the gangs. 

My photograph of the ‘Rivera Bad Girls’ reminds me of the importance of documenting for future generations. Connecting the past to the present is important, and these days I am still documenting the current protests taking place in New York City, still recording history with what Gordon Parks called my ‘weapon of choice,’ in the hope that it will do some good. 

British-born photographer Janette Beckman began her career in the punk rock era working for music magazines The Face and Melody Maker. She photographed bands from The Clash to Boy George as well as three Police album covers. In 1983 she moved to New York to document the underground hip-hop scene photographing pioneers like Run DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, Slick Rick and many more. Her work has been shown in galleries worldwide and is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the City of New York and the British National Portrait Gallery. Her monograph covering 40 years of photography Rebels From Punk To Dior was published by Drago in November 2021.