Review of Looking for Light: Jane Bown

As a fan of Jane Bown's magnificent photos, I was excited to see this film turn up on a streaming service, especially as I've never seen her appear on camera before, nor as far as I know even read so much as an interview with her. It soon becomes clear why that might be, as she doesn't really have very much to say about her career. Slightly tense conversations - with some tantalising period details about her early life - are interspersed with talking heads, mostly from her days at the Observer, so apart from singer Richard Ashcroft (I think the only one of her subjects to contribute) and fellow black & white legend Don McCullin, you wouldn't really recognise anyone. Faceless colleagues out-crass each other: a sweary photographer tells of how he was once sent in Bown's place to meet a subject, who unsurprisingly despatched him as he only wanted Bown to do the job, while the latest in a long line of bespectacled white men speaks highly of a journalist who (and I quote) "topped himself". Newspaper men are so charming. Tiresome hack Lynn Barber, whose every celebrity interview was always split fairly evenly between alienating the subject and talking about herself, obviously takes the opportunity to say how "resentful" she was that Bown was able to charm the pants off their subjects in about two minutes. Sometime socialist Polly Toynbee (okay, maybe not all the talking heads are male) laments occasions when she and Bown had to take the stately Observer company car to "some dreadful housing estate" to do a report. Bown by comparison is taciturn and sparing with her memories and remarks, but as much as I would have liked to hear more from her, it only makes her more fascinating. Several classic photos are included in the film (and lingered on long enough to marvel over), perhaps the best being her legendary portrait of Samuel Beckett, about which Bown and another newspaper colleague do thankfully have interesting things to say. Nonetheless, apart from the novelty value of Jane Bown having the camera turned on her for once, the viewer would probably get more out of looking through a book of her beautiful photos than from watching this.