Jane bown photography portraits of people

English photographer (1925–2014)

Jane Hope BownCBE (13 March 1925 – 21 December 2014) was an English photographer who worked for The Observer newspaper from 1949. Her portraits, primarily photographed in black and white and using available light, received widespread critical acclaim and her work has been described by Lord Snowdon as "a kind of English Cartier-Bresson."^[1][2]

Life and work

Bown was born in Eastnor, Herefordshire on 13 March 1925.

Jane bown prints

She described her childhood as happy, brought up in Dorset by women whom she believed to be her aunts. Bown said she was upset to realise, at the age of twelve, that one of them was her mother and her birth was illegitimate. This discovery precipitated her into delinquent behaviour in her adolescence, and acting coldly towards her mother.^[3] Her father had been the over sixty year old Charles Wentworth Bell who had employed her mother as a nurse.^[4] She first worked as a chart