the times | Tuesday December 23 2014

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Jane Bown

Celebrated photographer who captured the great and the good of British society on a small pocket camera
JANE BOWN/THE GUARDIAN, EAMONN MCCABE/CAMERA PRESS

Sent to cover a society wedding in Kent,

the photographer Jane Bown got to the
church early, found the nearest pub and
settled herself down at a corner table of
the empty bar. It was just after opening
time. Shortly afterwards three people
walked in. One was Elizabeth Taylor.
Scotch, she said. An equally laconic
Nol Coward was next, On the rocks.
He was followed by Richard Burton,
Make it a double. None of them were
noted for biddability with press photographers, especially when lubricated, but
Bown, a quiet, unassuming lady, persuaded them. The 1968 picture outside
the pub caught surprisingly thoughtful
expressions amid the finery and typified her ability to capture informality
beneath the public face.
Bown did not look like the leading
portrait photographer during David
Astors golden era at The Observer. She
looked more like a benign granny and
was often likened to Miss Marple. She
carried her small second-hand Olympus camera in a carrier bag buried underneath that days shopping. It was all
part of a carefully perfected act to put
her subjects at ease. She had no time for
the vast umbrellas and lighting paraphernalia used by most modern photographers; she had no assistants, and
opted for a small pocket camera, and
natural light. Neither did she use a light
meter or bother with speeds and stops
and filters; she was more concerned
with her sitters eyes. Those famous
subjects who failed to take her seriously
or even felt sorry for her as she pottered
about with her little camera were always caught out the following Sunday

She disappeared under

other snappers legs at
Jeremy Thorpes trial
when she revealed, in true Miss Marple
fashion, their real characters.
She never prepared for her shoots or
bothered to read up on the next celebrity destined for her lens because she
firmly believed that you could read a
persons character simply by looking into their face. Her photograph of a glowering Samuel Beckett with each crevice
of his face clearly visible in the light is
perhaps her most famous photograph.
Remarkably, she took it at the stage
door after he had cancelled the shoot.
My blood was up. I said Mr Beckett
you must be photographed, you agreed.
He was quite cross.
She took the pictures quickly, often
out of necessity because her shoot was
crammed into a five-minute slot at the
beginning or end of an interview by
Lynn Barber or Kenneth Tynan. Once
she felt she had the picture that bared
the soul she would purr, Ah, there you
are. Bown was often compared to Henri Cartier-Bresson but confessed to
hardly knowing who he was and did not
consider her profession an art. A
photograph is only a photograph, she
liked to say. On photographing the
Queen to commemorate the monarchs
80th birthday, she told her that she was
being photographed by a hack.
A tiny woman, Bown used her small
stature to good effect when faced with a
scrum of burly, Fleet Street snappers,
clamouring to take pictures of Jeremy
Thorpe emerging from court during his
trial in 1979. She disappeared under
their legs, emerging in the middle of the
melee and brilliantly captured his
haunted eyes.
It was, however, for her portraits that
she became best known. A photograph
of John Betjeman grinning impishly in
an ill-fitting suit on his favourite Cornish clifftop portrayed a rare moment
of mirth. Likewise, her photograph of
Anthony Blunt, taken in 1968, long

Bown, who photographed the Beatles in 1967, believed that you could read a persons character by looking into their face

impersonate her words in her Home

Counties accent. And when photographing Arthur Askey not long before
his death, she made the comedian, frail
and unsteady on his legs, repeatedly
descend a flight of stairs so that she
could get precisely the photograph she
wanted.
She liked a study of the multi-millionaire Paul Getty because of the
emptiness of his eyes. Another wonderfully seditious shot was of Arthur
Scargill standing quite unselfconsciously in front of a gigantic picture of
himself. The only failure she admitted
to was Tony Blair. She just could not
penetrate the grinning facade: It was
impossible, because there was nothing
real there.
Jane Bown was born in Eastnor, Herefordshire in 1925 out of the top
drawer, as she put it, but on the wrong
side. She did not know her father but
was brought up by five somewhat eccentric aunts one of whom, Daisy,
she only found out at the age of 12 was
her mother. A nurse, Daisy had fallen
pregnant during an affair with a dying
patient, Charles Wentworth Bell. Bown
spent the war in Liverpool with the
Wrens, working as a chart corrector on
the plans for the D-Day invasion. The

Bown was asked to shoot

Bertrand Russell, but
didnt know who he was
before he was exposed as a spy, ingeniously used a chiaroscuro effect which
left almost his entire frame in shadow,
hinting presciently at a murkier side to
his character. One of her favourite pictures was of Margaret Thatcher, at the
height of her power, positively radiating energy. When she arrived at Downing Street with an interviewer, Thatch-

er told the hapless journalist, I am not

here for conversation. I am here to have
my photograph taken by Miss Bown.
Her modesty masked a steeliness.
She once stopped Robin Williams
clowning in full flow in a hotel room.
Im very sorry, Mr Williams, but I dont
have time for this. Williams obediently
stopped. Only when she had left did he

Wrens gave her a list of possible jobs

after the war. I thought: photography
sounds nice, she recalled.
She studied photography under Ifor
Thomas at the Guildford School of
Photography between 1946 and 1950.
Thomas despaired of her because she
was so shy but he recognised her
potential when she returned from an

assignment in the countryside with a

beautiful close up of a cows eye. This
photograph brought her to the attention of The Observers first picture editor, Mechthild Nawiasky. He asked her
to do a portrait of Bertrand Russell and
his bride as they breakfasted at a
London hotel. I was terrified, I dont
think I even knew who he was, she
said. But the light was good.
Working in the days of newsprint rationing and 14-page papers, David Astor still found space for Bowns photographs even if they were unrelated to
the news so long as they cast some
light on the times in which we live or the
human condition.
Her husband Martin Moss, whom
she married in 1954 David Astor
gave her away was the managing director of Simpsons in Piccadilly. They
built a conventional Home Counties
life in Hampshire. He died in 2007. She
is survived by their three children.
Matthew is an accountant and Louisa
works in a bank. Her youngest son Hugo runs a graphic design business creating titles for television programmes.
Furious with her mother for not revealing herself, she remained unreconciled to Daisy who died when Jane was
20. The Observer became a surrogate
family and she loved to entertain staff
at weekends, even organising games of
cricket on the lawn. She became particularly close to what Malcolm Muggeridge called the tenants of Astors hostel for intellectual drunks. And while
Bown was a close friend of such heroic
staff drinkers as Patrick ODonovan
and John Gale, she was abstemious herself. They loved and admired her back.
Gale said her secret was simply that she
treated every job, even the smallest, as
though it was her first. In old age and
hardly able to walk, she continued to
turn up at the Guardian/Observer offices and sit in the lobby in the hope of
catching old friends for a chat.
With the advent of colour supplements, she stubbornly refused to switch
to colour, which she considered distracting and vulgar and her career suffered until a 1981 exhibition The Gentle
Eye won much acclaim when it was
shown at the National Portrait Gallery.
A late flowering followed, especially
after The Guardian bought The Observer in 1993. A Jane Bown archive was set
up and rare unpublished photographs
of the Beatles were found. In 1985 she
was appointed MBE and in 1995
advanced to CBE.
The Observer paired her with Andrew
Billen and she delighted in a new generation of stars of whom she had no prior
knowledge, including Jarvis Cocker,
Bjrk and PJ Harvey and Paul Merton
whom she made lie on the floor during his interview so as to capture him in
the light. She even became friends with
the Icelandic singer after shooting her in
a childlike pose with her eyes peering
out between her fingers. Such successes
demonstrated a bohemian streak that
danced out of her when she left the confines of her comfortable Hampshire
lifestyle. She did not wear fashionable
clothes and her home was furnished
tastefully in English country style with
old paintings. None of her photographs
were on display and few of her neighbours, who called her Mrs Moss, knew
anything of her other life.
She reluctantly agreed to co-operate
with a feature length documentary
about her work, referring to it as that
beastly film. The crowning irony after
65 five years of persuading people to reveal their true selves was that, to the
end of her life, she hated being photographed.
Jane Bown, CBE, photographer, was
born on March 13, 1925. She died on
December 21, 2014, aged 89