Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House/Houlang Publishing Company, October 2018, 1st edition
Zhou Yang (photographer, translator) recommended:
Jane Bown: A Lifetime of Looking (originally published in the UK in 2015) looks back at the life of British photographer Jane Bowen (1925-2014), edited by her friend Luke Dodd, featuring more than 200 photographs from all of her work. In her 65 years as a photographer for The Observer, Britain's veteran newspaper, she has seen Samuel Beckett's hostility, faced Margaret Thatcher's toughness, and traveled alone to Buckingham Palace to take a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II's 80th birthday. In addition to portraits of various people, she also took various news photos for The Observer.
Inside pages of the book
With a consistent humility, Bowen calls herself a "man who sells photographs for a living," and from strikes to archaeological excavations, from demonstrations to celebrity weddings, she won't turn down any kind of shooting assignment. As a dutiful newspaper photographer, Bowen often prioritized the needs of photo editors when working, and when reporting on strikes, she always photographed crowds of people waving slogans, which were always selected for publication at the time, but half a century later, when Luke Dodd browsed Bauer's boxes of negatives to organize her photographic albums and make documentaries, he found that Bowen also took photos from a personal perspective during his reporting missions. The works are often of a small group of people or a couple, such as a 1992 photograph of a refugee, in which four people huddled together, the water surface in the background suggesting that they are in a small boat, three of the men are looking down, and one woman is looking out of the photograph. They are all immersed in their own world, and at that moment they have nothing to do with the noise or chaos of the outside world, and Bowen, who observes these scenes behind the camera, seals this silence in his own way.
Bowen's photography career began in 1946, shortly after she retired from the Women's Royal Naval Service, a job that gave her the opportunity to receive a bursary, so she enrolled in the only full-time photography course in the UK at the Guildford School of Art. While the name "Jane Bowen" was always associated more with her later iconic black-and-white portraits, she still considered the early photographs—gypsy children, farm workers, passers-by—to be her best work, and she notes that what made her happiest was "going out and seeing things, and still is." These pictures are the real me. ”
Bowen once described herself as an eagle, her eyes scanning at every moment, a passion for observing her surroundings that was in keeping with the name of the newspaper she had worked for more than half a century: The Observer. Shortly after graduating, she got her first assignment from the newspaper's owner, David Astor, to photograph a portrait of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. She recalled the shooting as saying it was "a terrible experience, I didn't even know who he was... But the light is not bad. ”
In fact, many of Bowen's portraits were taken with little knowledge of the subject. Her portraits do not rely on preliminary research, unexpected ideas or complex sets, but only a very short time, enough for her to see a subject clearly, without losing the intuitive feeling of the first sight because of familiarity. Her fastest record is said to be 30 seconds — in 1976, she "caught" Samuel Beckett, a playwright known for her fear of footage, in a dark alley in London and snapped five quick photographs, one of which is now Beckett's standard.
Of course, only emphasizing the efficiency of Bowen's shooting obviously ignores the true quality of her portrait, that is, it is a touch of melancholy in the calm. In 1981, writer Beryl Bainbridge sat on a couch and looked directly into Bowen's shot; in 1992, Bowen captured Sinead O'Connor's drooping eyes in the crowded backstage. These photos make people feel sad from the bottom of their hearts, not because the subject is crying and weeping, but because they are frank about their vulnerability, which makes them show their beautiful beauty.
Samuel Beckett
Sinead O'Connor (left)
From 1949 until the end of Bowen's life, she maintained the habit of reporting to the Observer two days a week, which for her was a "homecoming." Many times she referred to the Observer as "home" and her boss, Astor, as her favorite, and in 1954, when Bowen married Martin Moss, who was general manager of fashion retail, Astor took on the role of father, "handing over" Bowen to her husband. After marriage, Bowen almost lived a "double life", five days a week, she was "Mrs Moss", living outside London with her husband and three children, and on Friday and Saturday, she came to the office in Fleet Street in London, waiting for various shooting tasks, at this time, she became "Jane Bowen". Thousands of negatives, prints and photographs she photographed were concentrated in the Observer's office, and there was no Bowen work in her own room. She strictly distinguishes between family life and work, because for her photography is a secret room in the depths of her heart, a world that her family cannot set foot in.
Bowen doesn't talk about her photography, she loves silence more than words—her credo has always been: "Photographers should neither be seen nor heard." The petite figure makes it easy for Bowen to blend into the background in order to observe everything undisturbed. Born in 1925 in 1925 in 1925, Bowen discovered that she was an illegitimate daughter, a blow that seemed to undermine her trust in the outside world and foreshadow her later alert and covert way of working.
Diane Arbus, a contemporary American photographer active across the ocean, once likened the camera to her "passport", allowing her to enter a fringe world that was mutually exclusive to her middle-class origins; for Bowen, the camera functioned in the opposite way, it was her shield, and under the protection of the camera, she was able to enter the world cautiously again. As a result, most of her best "entertaining" photos are taken from the back, or when people are focused on something and don't realize she exists. For example, in a couple photographed in Southend-on-Sea in 1954, the man only showed his hands on the back of the recliner, and through the gap in the back of the chair, he could see that the woman looked at her partner with a fervent smile on her face; for example, in a photo taken in a london park in 1963, the apparently wealthy family was napping on a bench, and the men were reading carefully, while the fashionably dressed woman wearing a pearl necklace had her lips slightly open and fell asleep on her back, and their son also rested his head on his mother's lap and slept soundly. In the photograph, they all seem to be completely defenseless of the outside world, and their calm trust in the world may be attracting Bowen, who is always vigilant; and she seems to be unable to resist adding a protective film to their state and keeping it in the photo forever.
Undoubtedly, the medium of photography itself is sad, because it superficially freezes time, but in fact it makes people more and more aware of the passage of time. Near the end of her life, Bowen was so aware of this that she, who had always thought that photographers should not be heard or seen, finally began to tell her editor and friend Luke Dodd about her past life and shooting. She donated all of her negatives, notes, prints and photographs to The Observer to build a complete archive, but the prospect of separation from the partners who had accompanied her throughout her life and the fact that she knew she would never be able to take pictures again made her sad. Dodd writes, "She was born for photography," perhaps more accurately understood as someone who loves the world through photography, and she also admitted that when she looks at someone through the lens, in an instant, she feels a strong love for them. As soon as Bowen realized she had the ideal photo, she immediately disappeared.
Jane Bown
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