Not Giving A Moss

Today was grey, cold and damp and I was not feeling creative in the least - this image is actually of the moss on the roof of the station where I drop my brother off first thing in the morning. A bit of scraping of the photographic barrel occurring here!
At the completely other end of the photographic scale I read a great article in the Guardian today entitled "My best shot". It is a weekly feature which does exactly what it says on the tin - a photographer selects the best or favourite shot of their career (so far).
Today's subject was an English photographer named Janette Beckman and her image was a 1983 shot of three young women from East LA who called themselves the Rivera Bad Girls posing in front of a car. 
 She had been staying in Los Angeles documenting the punk scene when she saw a story in LA Weekly about an Mexican American gang called Hoyo Maravilla. She was fascinated by the culture of the different communities in East LA that she, being British, was unaware of.
She was eventually introduced to the three young women and loved the amazing look of their makeup, style and even their eyebrows - completely different to the punks and hip-hop kids she had been photographing. She tried to get publications interested in her photographs at the time but no one showed any enthusiasm - it wasn't until 2011 that they were published in New York in a book called El Hoyo Maravilla.
The postscript to this was that after the book came out she was contacted on social media by one of the three young women in the photo and then a guy who had been one of the gang members. She ended up shipping prints to them and then having an exhibition in Los Angeles in 2013, to which the women were invited. The vast majority of the gang members in her images were now dead or in jail but the three young women in her 'best shot' were still living in the same neighbourhood and all of them had done really well in their chosen careers. A really fascinating story garnered from one photograph!

Track of the day: Heels by Billy Nomates

Podcast of the day: Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay (on BBC Sounds)