Jane Bown
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jane Bown (born 1925) is a British photographer who has worked for The Observer newspaper in the United Kingdom since 1949. Her portraits of the famous of the 20th and 21st centuries have received critical acclaim, even earning her an exhibition of her work in the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1980.
She works primarily in black-and-white, using available light, with a forty year old camera. She has photographed hundreds of subjects, including Queen Elizabeth II for her eightieth birthday, Orson Welles, Samuel Beckett, Sir John Betjeman, Woody Allen, Cilla Black, Quentin Crisp, P. J. Harvey, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, the gangster Charlie Richardson, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer and Margaret Thatcher.
She was born in Dorset, and first worked as a chart corrector, which included a role in plotting the D-Day invasion. She studied photography at Guildford College. She started out as a child portrait photographer, but got her big break when she received a telegram in 1949 from an Observer editor, asking her to photograph the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
In 1985, she was awarded an MBE and in 1995, she was "upgraded" to the CBE.
