Jane Bown (born 1928) is a British photographer who has worked for The Observer newspaper in the United Kingdom since 1949. Her portraits of the famous of the 20th and 21st century have received critical acclaim, even earning her an exhibition of her work in the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1980.
She works primarily in black-and-white, using available light. She has photographed hundreds of subjects, including Woody Allen, Samuel Beckett, Sir John Betjeman, Cilla Black, Quentin Crisp, P. J. Harvey, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, the gangster Charlie Richardson, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, Margaret Thatcher, and Orson Welles.
She was born in Dorset, and first worked as a chart corrector, which included a role in plotting the D-Day invasion. She studied photography at Guildford College. She started out as a child portrait photographer, but got her big break when she received a telegram in 1949 from an Observer editor, asking her to photograph the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
In 1985, she was awarded an MBE and in 1995, she was "upgraded" to the CBE.
