Jane Bown (1925 - 2014)

Jane Hope Bown CBE (13 March 1925 – 21 December 2014) was a British photographer who worked for The Observer newspaper from 1949. Her portraits of famous people received critical acclaim.

 Early life

Bown was born in Eastnor, Herefordshire, and brought up in Dorset by women who she regarded as her aunts, although she later discovered that she was the illegitimate daughter of one of them.[2] She first worked as a chart corrector, which included a role in plotting the D-Day invasion. She studied photography at Guildford College under Ifor Thomas.

Career

She started out as a child portrait photographer, but had a break in 1949 when she met Mechthild Nawiasky, an Observer picture editor, who asked her to photograph the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Bown worked primarily in black-and-white, using available light, and a forty-year-old film camera. She photographed hundreds of subjects, including Orson Welles, Samuel Beckett, Sir John Betjeman, Woody Allen, Cilla Black, Quentin Crisp, P. J. Harvey, John Lennon, Truman Capote, John Peel, the gangster Charlie Richardson, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, Jarvis Cocker, Björk, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Evelyn Waugh, Brassai and Margaret Thatcher. She took Queen Elizabeth II's eightieth birthday portrait.

Bown's extensive photojournalism output includes series on Hop Pickers, Greenham Common evictions, Butlin's holiday resort, the British Seaside, and in 2002, Glastonbury festival. Her social documentary and photo journalism was mostly unseen before the release of her book Unknown Bown 1947-1967 in 2007.

In 2007 her work on the Greenham Common evictions was selected by Val Williams and Susan Bright as part of How We Are: Photographing Britain, the first major survey of photography to be held at Tate Britain.

In 2014, directors Luke Dodd and Michael Whyte released a documentary about Bown, Looking For Light, featuring conversations with Bown about her life and interviews with those she photographed and worked with, including Edna O'Brien, Lynn Barber and Richard Ashcroft.

Honours and awards

In 1985, she was awarded an MBE and in 1995, a CBE. She was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society in 2000. These are awarded to 'distinguished persons having, from their position or attainments, an intimate connection with the science or fine art of photography or the application thereof'.

Personal life

Bown married the fashion retail executive Martin Moss, who died in 2007. On 21 December 2014, Bown died at the age of 89.