Jane Bown was the Observer photographer for over 60 years; she was renowned for always getting the shot, earning herself the nickname ‘Tenacity Jane.’ Many of her pictures have become iconic, including that of the famously camera-phobic Samuel Beckett, snapped in an alleyway and a picture of Bjork, covering the lower half of her face with her fingers. Bjork said of Bown “She can look at a person and she knows, instinctively, straight away, who they are.”
The definitive monograph of Bown’s has now been produced, edited by her friend Luke Dodd and entitled Jane Bown: A Lifetime of Looking. Her ability to get under a sitter’s skin can be seen in this collection, in portraits of James Baldwin, Mick Jagger, the Queen and a rather magical picture of Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Noel Coward all laughing, dressed as though for a day at the races.
Among over 200 photographs, there are also examples of her previously unseen street photography so that images of fishermen, picknicking postmen and dustmen on strike nestle alongside those of Liberace and Muhammad Ali. The book is a joy in itself but also serves as a kind of record of the second half of the twentieth century: there is a portrait of Jean Cocteau as well as a picture of a protest against the state visit of the Greek royal family in London in 1963. There are girls playing lacrosse at Rodean as well as a clutch of younger girls stood by a burnt out tram in Woolwich. And the collection is arranged with a degree of wit so that smartly dressed men attending a Sotheby’s house sale (several sat, waiting on a four poster bed) appear on the page next to a homeless man dressed in a dishevelled version of their outfits, eating from a saucepan on a parkbench.
