The Royal House announced the death of Elizabeth II on the networks with an iconic image by photographer Jane Bown taken in 2006 on the occasion of the sovereign’s 80th birthday
“Head-and-shoulders portrait photograph of Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926) seated facing right, with her head slightly turned toward the camera. She looks ahead and smiles. She wears a hat with three threads. pearl necklace, pearl earrings, a light-colored jacket and a light-colored blouse.” This is the technical description deposited in the Royal Collection Trust on the portrait with which Buckingham Palace illustrated on Thursday the announcement of her Majesty’s death on Twitter and Instagram. The image was taken in February 2006 to commemorate the sovereign’s 80th birthday (two months to go) and was made by Jane Bown. A photojournalist, like the queen of England, eternal.
Bown worked for ‘The Observer’ for 65 years before passing away in 2014, in his late 90s. A professional of race she rarely abandoned black and white – as she did when she shot PJ Harvey in 1995 – and never betrayed her old cameras with new technologies. From a humble family that left her in the care of some relatives of hers, a native of Dorset, she had a difficult childhood and took her first photos of herself at age 13 with a modest machine that her aunts bought for her. That’s where her greatness began.
Mythology and history. Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Orson Welles, Michael Caine, Truman Capote, Woody Allen, Keith Richards, Bette Davis, Jean Cocteau or the philosopher Bertrand Russell, his first work for the British newspaper, published in 1949, have passed his goal. One of his best-known photographs is that of the playwright Samuel Beckett in 1976. Dark, deep, strong and penetrating. It has its history. The author, fleeing from the flashes, left a rehearsal in a London theater through a door that led to an alley. There he was waiting for Jane to get the perfect portrait in just thirty seconds.
The image of Elizabeth II is the result of the meeting of two octogenarians. The sovereign herself chose him for her portrait. The queen, about to turn 80: Jane, 81 fulfilled. In Buckingham Palace, two women on whom geopolitics and the images of a century have pivoted move according to the dance of light. Elizabeth II is seated in a high-backed chair. The photographer flutters around her. She fights against the natural hieraticism of her model and the betrayals of the sun that filters through the windows of the Blue Room. She takes three snapshots. Luke Todd, responsible for the graphic archive of ‘The Observer’, remembers the elements that the photographer needed in her sessions: “A ‘spark'” of recognition between her and the subject, good natural light and as few people as possible “around . Jane works alone. “She couldn’t work with assistants. She would not know what to tell them to do », she confessed in an interview. She doesn’t give instructions to her protagonists either. She watches them, makes them gain confidence and shoots.
Bown, right, with her cameras, during a press conference for actress Bette Davis
Todd: “Work quickly, quietly and discreetly. The innate ability to put the sitter at ease is the key to respectful and revealing portraits of him». The session with Elizabeth II is short-lived. The photojournalist does not spend more than ten or fifteen minutes per session. “Often, it ends before the model realizes what has happened,” says the editor. “Some photographers take photos, but I try to find them,” she used to repeat. Another of her proclamations: “Photographers should never be seen or heard.”
light and gaze
The image that illustrates the obituary shows Elizabeth II, like the Gioconda, with a singular rictus on her face. How did she get it? The legend tells the following. An employee of the monarch, her trusted assistant, suddenly enters the room. The queen, seeing a close and familiar face of hers entering her field of vision, turns her gaze slightly towards her. She relaxes, smiles very subtly and her eyes lose their institutionality. The sovereign gives way to the woman. Her friend. The light accompanies and enhances this moment. Jane captures him.
His death in 2014 garnered the condolences of the profession and a long anecdote. Lord Snowdon called it the English Cartier-Bresson. In that closet of anecdotes, the revelation in the documentary ‘Looking for Light’ emerges strongly, according to which the photographer separated her professional life so perfectly from her personal life that during the week she dedicated herself to her husband and her three children in his family home in the country and on weekends he would travel to London, sit at his desk at ‘The Observer’ and humbly wait for the editor to assign him his stories. She never protested a story.
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