Beckman's 700-Image NYC Street Photo Exhibit Opens at MoPOP
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- Janette Beckman's 700-image street photography exhibit is on view at Seattle's MoPOP, drawing from three decades of work she shot largely with a Hasselblad camera in New York City.
- Beckman says she became "obsessed with wandering the ever-changing New York streets" in the 1990s, and her method was to take trains to random stops, exit into unfamiliar neighborhoods, and approach strangers to ask to photograph them.
- The exhibit documents New York's cultural rituals, including the Puerto Rican Day parade (1995, 2017), St. Patrick's Day parade (1996), and Easter Sunday in Harlem (2015).
- Beckman captures neighborhood textures across Brooklyn (Gleason's Gym boxers, 2000), the Lower East Side (a kid with a boom box, 1992), Brownsville (a barbershop, 2009), and the West Village (street basketball, 1995).
- Beckman recalls a 1990s New York that was "real in your face" with "flava" — "folks from all over the world, music played loud everywhere, police sirens, carhorns, crazy people" — a sensibility the photos preserve.
- Beckman continues to work as a street photographer and teaches a street portrait class at the School of Visual Arts, with the exhibit including work as recent as 2025's "Newspaper sock, Midtown."
Why it matters: Beckman's 30-plus years of New York street work, now consolidated into a 700-image retrospective, gives a museum audience an extended look at the city's cultural rituals — Puerto Rican Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter in Harlem, boxing gyms — and neighborhood textures from the Lower East Side to Brownsville that visitors rarely encounter in a single sitting, and the show's span (1992 to 2025) makes it a working photographer's record rather than a nostalgia piece.
