Jane Bown: A Lifetime of Looking

Description

Featuring 200 black-and-white and colour images, this book includes her iconic portraits and extensive photojournalism from the Greenham Common evictions to the Iranian embassy siege. Bown's pictures allow us to walk back in time as she captured - with curiosity, respect and wit - the people of the UK: you'll find heroic strikers, soulful miners, proud dogwalkers, busy fishermen, dancing girls, picnicking postmen and excited daytrippers side by side with the Queen, Mick Jagger, Charlie Chaplain, Margot Fonteyn, Sinead O'Connor, the Beatles and Spike Lee. This definitive collection not only presents Jane's well-known shots, it includes substantial material that has never been seen before. This book presents the most comprehensive collection of Jane Bown's work - created during the 1940s through the 2010s. The book will be edited by friend and curator Luke Dodd.

Jane Bown began working at the Observer in 1949. Bown's great mantra was, 'photographers should neither be seen nor heard'. An ideal shoot was one where she exposed no more than a roll and a half of film, often in just 15 minutes. Once she cornered the notoriously camera-phobic Samuel Beckett in a dark alleyway down the side of the Royal Court theatre in London as he tried to escape her lens. With simmering hostility, he stood long enough for Jane to expose five frames - the middle one is one of her most recognisable portraits and the best portrait of the playwright. She was made an MBE in 1985, a CBE in 1995. She died in December 2014.