User Reviews

I found this quite moving and inspirational. I met Jane Bown once in a lift on my way to the Observer as a young photographer. This film gets to the essence of one of the great portrait photographers of recent times. It begins to explore the method which was derived in part from her background and from her belief about what things should look like, the shape and texture of life.

Now aged 89, Jane Bown has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a photographer - mostly with the London Observer newspaper. Luke Dodd and Michael Whyte's documentary looks at her career, focusing in particular on her abilities to uncover her subjects while making them feel entirely at ease. The film also traces Bown's turbulent origins - as an illegitimate daughter, she never knew her father and was taken away from her mother at an early age. Since then she has always been in search of a stable family, both at home and in work; hence her fondness for working for the Observer family, especially under the benevolent paternalism of David Astor. Sometimes the documentary feels a bit like a memory-fest, where the directors drag out familiar faces - Polly Toynbee, Nobby Clark, Edna O'Brien - to contribute their reminiscences of working with Bown; but the filmmakers have done a creditable job in conjuring up a vanished world of print journalism. However the narrative is particularly slack in structure; there are too many interruptions where examples of Bown's photography are shown, as if to confirm her past reputation as someone engaged to work with the biggest stars. Perhaps the documentary might have benefited from some more contextual information, especially for viewers unacquainted with the "hot metal" days of newspaper production of which Bown was such a notable part. Nonetheless, LOOKING FOR LIGHT offers a generally sympathetic portrait of a once-great photographer now sadly affected with the beginnings of Alzheimer's Disease.

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.

This marvellously subtle profile of photographer Jane Bown conveys how she combined a self-effacing presence (the opposite of what you expect a Fleet Street photographer to be) with what Bown describes as "a sharp pair of elbows". The film allows you to enjoy Bown's greatest images in silence while situating her in her social context: a now-vanished world of print journalism, where the editors and owners were from the officer class, and the journalists and photographers were often regarded as NCOs or lower ranks. There is also a sub-text about a talented woman, never quite sure who her parents were and passed around "like a parcel", who adopted The Observer as her family. And the film conveys poignantly how encroaching Alzheimer's can render childhood memories more vivid than this weeks's events. Bown looks back on sixty years of photo-journalism and celebrities - from The Beatles to Sam Beckett to the Queen - still looking for the light.