Abstract
Working for the Observer Magazine in the 1980s, I once met Jane Bown on a bus. She was carrying her trademark shopping bag that contained her camera. She told me she was on her way to Soho to photograph some members of a pop group called The Rolling Stones. I took this nonchalance with a pinch of salt: the Stones were famous by then and such studied vagueness was part of Bown's persona. Underneath her rather cosy and gentle manner lurked a shrewd and focused personality.
Bown joined The Observer in 1949 and over the next 60 years became an institution at the paper, not unlike a journalistic equivalent of the Queen Mum, respected and well liked, in particular by David Astor, the long-term editor and owner. She would potter around the Observer offices with a slightly distracted air, as if unsure she was in the right place. Dodd relates that Bown had an unhappy adolescence, discovering at the age of 12 that she was illegitimate. This may explain why she was content to stay involved with the Observer family for all of her career.
Bown liked to call herself a hack, by which she meant that for most of her life, she earned her living working in newspapers, but she took her photography seriously. Her professional mantra was that “photographers should be seen and not heard” and she never much liked to talk about her work, wanting the images to stand in their own right. She liked to work unobtrusively, without fuss, without artificial lighting or even a light meter (she would take a light reading by noticing how the light fell on the back of her hand). She preferred to know little or nothing about her subjects, suggesting both shyness and a reticence to interact too closely with them. Nevertheless, Bown herself acknowledged that she possessed a certain inner steeliness; Dodd quotes her as saying, “My elbows are as sharp as anyone else's”. She could be pushy and opportunistic. The photographer Daniel Meadows recalls meeting her during a hectic film set photo call when she badgered him relentlessly into giving her his light meter reading.
Unlike many photographers, Bown was content to work with an interviewer or feature writer because it gave her time to size up the person and work at speed. Her small stature - just under 5 feet tall - and her slightly eccentric demeanour was useful in disarming her subjects' egos; she played this advantage to the full. She seldom used more than a roll and a half of film on an assignment, an extraordinarily economical approach for a professional.
Bown's lasting reputation is based on her close-up portraits but at times these can seem formulaic. She was, after all, working week in, week out for a trusted employer, giving it what it expected. Some of her more telling portraits show aspects of the immediate environment: John Betjeman laughing uproariously on a rolling hillside, Jean Cocteau thrusting his cat out towards the camera in a gesture of unconscious defence. Laughter features in possibly her most famous image, that of Mick Jagger guffawing away (oh, to have been a fly on the wall to hear what so amused him). She did not force the issue if someone was uncooperative – a grim and startled Samuel Beckett personifies the “bugger off” response that great artists seem to reserve for press photographers. Bown cornered him in a dark alleyway by the Royal Court theatre and managed to get five frames before he fled.
The book's editor, Luke Dodd, is a former director of the Guardian newsroom and a long-term colleague and friend of Bown. The inclusion of more than 200 images is far too indulgent. In photography, as in many other areas of life, less is often best. It is a surprise to find that Bown produced some reportage photography early on but visual story telling was not her forte – many of these photographs verge on the ordinary or mundane. One or two of her observed social images do stand out: a rare colour photograph of two vulnerable young boys about to leave for prep school tugs at the heart and a street shot of a queue of Rochdale citizens is saturated with the atmosphere of the 1950s.
This publication is well printed with a clean, simple and effective design, making intelligent use of visual juxtapositions and respecting Bown's photographic philosophy. It contains a number of superlative and unforgettable images, Bown at her best. Unfortunately, Dodd does not do his friend's legacy any favours by including pictures that are weak. These less memorable photographs diminish the overall impact and make it a less than fulsome tribute to Bown's extraordinary career.