MANY came to admire Jane Bown (above, in a self-portrait
taken in a mirror) through her photographs in The
Observer. There is a stunning luminosity about them which is
truly soul-searching. In the documentary Looking for Light:
Jane Bown (Cert. 12), there is a great deal about souls, hers
and others'.
This is hardly surprising, as Michael Whyte interrupted his
sequence of faith movies - No Greater Love (about
Carmelite nuns) and Relics and Roses (the UK tour of St
Thérèse of Lisieux's remains) - to co-direct this with Luke Dodd.
The film (in colour, unlike Bown's photography) is sometimes
repetitive; nor is it always easy on the ear. Its overall effect,
though, is similar to gazing on icons or looking through stained
glass "and there the heav'n espy".
Bown's laconic responses redirect us to her pictures. The film
periodically goes into silent mode, letting photographs speak for
themselves. From Bertrand Russell to Desmond Tutu, just about
anybody who has been anybody over the past sixty years is revealed
in new light. She shows people as they would want to be known ("the
light behind the eyes" as Edna O'Brien puts it), drawing out the
very essence of her sitters. It is never flattery, but, like a pet
dog, she approaches famous subjects usually knowing next to nothing
about them. A journalist colleague whom Bown would accompany to
interviews says that she would unobtrusively circumnavigate the
person until she found what she was looking for. "Ah yes. There you
are," she would say, and then begin photographing.
Bown would be too modest to compare her use of her talent to
Michelangelo's notion of freeing the angel lying within the block
of stone. She would prefer to say, together with cultures that
believe that taking someone's photograph steals his or her soul,
that she finds photographs within the people.
The Observer and Guardian feature-writer Sean
O'Hagan applies Henri Cartier-Bresson's dictum to Bown that, in
creating a good portrait, you are always looking for the silence
within or around someone. Bown's picture of Samuel Beckett
backstage at the Royal Court Theatre gives us the abiding gravity
of that writer, and reminds us of our aloneness. Jane Bown claims
to have known happiness only when using a camera, and, pushing 90,
remains to this day guilt-ridden about how she treated her
unmarried mother.
Considering her upbringing by various aunts, she feels a bit
like pass-the-parcel, where the string is becoming undone and the
brown paper is in bits. These inner hurts, however, may well have
assisted her ability, as the singer Richard Ashworth describes it,
to enter into another's soul. When visiting relatives' graves in
Eastnor churchyard, Herefordshire (the Team Vicar and parish are
mentioned in the closing credits), her restless soul takes comfort
from the epitaph on a headstone: "My presence shall go with thee
and I shall give thee rest" (Exodus 33.14).
She also relates that, when she was working with the journalist
John Gale, he started every interview with "What are you hoping
for? Do you believe in God? and what would you like for your
birthday breakfast?" Bown's answers are that she hopes to resolve
her beginning (regrets over mother, no doubt) as much as her end;
wants Grape-Nuts for breakfast, and believes in God, "probably, in
my fashion".
Not everyone will see the film in this way, of course, but
there's something of divine enquiry in how her camera opens windows
into our souls' shades of grey. As she says at the start of the
film, life is a mystery.