“Other people take photographs. I try to find photographs.”

So said Jane Bown, the Observer newspaper’s go-to portrait photographer for some six decades, and a talented photojournalist to boot, whose reputation soared towards the end of her career, and just keeps on soaring after her death, aged 89, in 2014. Now, a retrospective of her work, curated by Dr Loucia Manopoulou, opens at Newlands House Gallery, the latest in a succession of solo exhibitions. She referred to herself as a ‘hack’, but Bown’s lifelong career as a jobbing newspaper photographer belied her innate talent. She is, posthumously, becoming seen as an artist: Lord Snowden and Germaine Greer both referred to her as ‘the British Cartier-Bresson’, and it’s easy to see why.

Read Behind the eyes from ROSA Magazine Autumn 2025 here