Exposures

Jane Bown has been taking portraits for the "Observer" for sixty years; anyone who has picked up the paper will be aware of her extraordinary talent. Working almost exclusively in black and white and with natural light, she produces astonishingly candid photographs that reveal the private side of her famous subjects. She works quickly, unobtrusively and decisively, often snatching great pictures in impossible circumstances, and she has an unerring instinct for capturing the telling moment, even in the midst of a media scrum or rushed in mid-interview. This new collection not only presents Jane's well-known shots, it also goes behind the scenes to reveal unpublished pictures - the ones that hit the newsroom floor. At every shoot, Jane took numerous wonderful studies, but the 'definitive' image was usually chosen by the picture editor, sometimes on the basis of something as arbitrary as how much space was available on the page. In "Exposures", Jane's photos finally get to speak for themselves.
Presented here uncropped and in their full glory, these photographs show why Jane has been hailed as the natural successor of Cartier-Bresson and as one of the UK's preeminent portrait photographers.