Jane Bown, Eve Arnold

NQ Photographers are researching photographers who work in different styles.
I'm not looking for heaps of words.
I'm looking for some sample pictures, what genre are they, a couple of useful facts, and your attempt at describing their technique and style.


Here is Jane Bown.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2009/oct/22/jane-bown-photography 

So: some facts. She shot portraits for the Observer newspaper of writers, politicians, artists and musicians - anyone who was in the public eye. She has done this for about four or five decades, her first picture being published in 1949. She was awarded an MBE for her work, and when the Queen asked what she did, Jane replied, "I'm a hack." (Which means a working newspaper reporter. Nothing special.) The pictures would appear in the newspaper alonsgside an interview with the person, and they would have been ordered (commissioned) by the picture editor  of the paper. So she would be taking pictures to fit the space in the newspaper.
Technique and style - she always worked with 'available light', which means that she did not use flash or lights. Usually you can see that she has asked the person to sit where light is falling through a window. She concentrates on the eyes and the light. She often used a type of camera that produces large negatives and which you hold at waist level and look down on it to focus.  (A TLR Rollieflex) and this allowed her to talk and to keep eye contact with the person being photographed. She did not want the photographic gear and technique to get in the way.
All of her pictures are shot in black-and-white film.
I think her pictures are simple and clear and so would be easy to understand in a newspaper, where tone and image quality sometimes gets smudged. (Pictures in papers used to be called smudges, and photographers were sometimes called smudgers. Writers were scribblers.)
She is very aware of light, but is mostly interested in the person, who she always photographs in quite a flattering and kind way. Her pictures suggest that she both likes and respects people, which I think is a good approach to take.


And here is Eve Arnold .
She said,  "If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument." 
Eve is American and has been working over the same period as Jane Bown. She joined Magnum Photos in about 1950. She is a photojournalist, which is similar to what Jane Bown does, but she did more than portraits. Often she would try to photograph life and events as they happen, without interrupting the activity. 
Photographers like Eve tried to tell a factual story with their pictures, often publishing sets of pictures in a sequence over many pages  of magazines like Life. This was how many people throughout the world learned about the rest of the world. (Before the internet.)
She shot in colour as well as black-and-white, and photographed people like Marilyn Monroe, who she became friends with, Malcolm X (which required considerable bravery) and Elizabeth Taylor.
One of her biggest assignments was a 1979 trip to China, which was something she had wanted to do since she first picked up a camera, but China was a closed country, especially to Americans.
It took her 15 years before she was given permission, during which time she slept with books about China by her bed, and read everything she could about the country. She was 67 when she got her wish, and she travelled for five months, covering 40,000 miles, working every day from 5 or 6 in the morning.
The routine made her ill, catching pneumonia, and on her first morning out of bed recovering she photographed an elderly woman to produce a picture that became one of the most famous shots of the century.

She said the woman peeked round a corner and saw Eve at the moment Eve photographed her. "What a strange looking woman that is," the Chinese woman said to the interpreter. Eve described her as magnificent, and the faces of older women in China as 'works of art.'
Picture like this, that live on beyond their original newspaper or magazine purpose are sometimes described as icons. This is a portrait, and a piece of journalism. But because it seems to reach people over the years, it can also be described as art - or even fine art.