Jane Bown remembered: ‘We had fun, didn’t we?’

Over 60 years, Jane Bown produced some of the most recognisable portraits of the world’s most famous faces, but remained an enigma, even among some of her closest colleagues

For a long time my hall boasted three photographs by Jane, taken over consecutive days in America in 1994. One was of the Coen brothers, arranged geometrically in the doorway of their Manhattan apartment, and laughing. Another was of the feminist thinker Kate Millett, in shorts and muddy boots on her farm in Poughkeepsie. The third had a becapped Michael Moore thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets. They represented by no means the peak of Jane’s long career. Although the Coen brothers wrote to say it was the best portrait they had ever had, Moore’s was only a bit better than a snap. I did, however, regard them as mementoes of an apex in my professional life, unlikely to be exceeded. I had been bouncing around New York, city and state, with not only the best portrait photographer in Britain, but a friend. As Jane would say: “We had fun, didn’t we?”