Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/02

[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]

Subject: [Leica] Great Photographers DB; portraitists; Jane Bown
From: Jeff Moore <jbm@oven.com>
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 14:18:16 +0100

2000-05-02-00:45:15 John Coan:
> I am not in any way a photography scholar, but was curious why
> portrait was omitted?

This mention of portrait folk reminds me: I'm in London for awhile and
just saw a show of work by a woman named Jane Bown, who's a fantastic
portraitist whose name I'd somehow never managed to hear in the US.
Am I just particularly badly informed, or is she pretty much only
known in the UK?  And if so, why?

(Further background: she's been at it for years, and does seem to
manage to interact intriguingly with her subjects; she apparently has
classic Teddish habits involving finding a likely patch of natural light
and making sure the eyeballs are in focus; one note suggested that
her camera is almost-permanently set at 1/60 and f/2.8 [50mm lens?  I
dunno.]; whatever she's been using for the last few years, apparently
something from Olympus, is optically quite lovely -- I suspected Leica
until corrected.)