There was never any mistaking her, the late great Jane Bown, who died on 21 December at the age of 89, but whose presence lives on in her extraordinary pictures, and in the pages and the spirit of the Observer, her second home for over six decades. A small, round figure with a shy smile and a deceiving air of vagueness, carrying her camera in a wicker basket; the least tricksy and most mysterious of photographers, the most singular and haunting.  I have several prints by Jane, collected over the years. There’s one of St Mark’s Square in Venice, empty in the early morning light except for an upward flutter of pigeons; a child’s foot in a scuffed dusty shoe; a young girl standing on a railway track, forlorn; a gypsy child; an anxious schoolboy in baggy shorts standing on a chair to reach the blackboard and you want to rescue him; several photos of my children when they were younger – and how did she, in those few seconds, recognise something in their faces that I had not seen myself until then? How did she manage to catch them in that sudden and startled moment of stillness? These images, taken at various periods of her life and all very different in their subject matter, all carry the unmistakable imprint of Jane Bown.  And I’ve been trying to think of what “Jane Bown” means now she is gone. The simple eloquence of that vulnerable foot in its scuffed shoe reminds me of the profound eloquence of the cow’s eye, the photograph with which Jane discovered her calling all those years ago as a student just out of the Wrens, alone and unsure of where life would take her. You can make out the tiny image of the photographer reflected in the cow’s large liquid eye that captures a moment of reciprocity. Something is happening in the fragment of time when the shutter blinks and sees – and something looks back. There is some kind of tender but also scary exposure, some kind of recognition that passes between subject and object. Over the years I knew and worked with her, I saw the same thing happen time after time: that click, that exposure, that sense of a discovery. It was marvellous and, at times, slightly uncanny.  When I arrived at the Observer at the start of 1990, Jane had already been there for 41 years. She was often in the building, carrying her bags and wicker basket, bending over her work, visiting the darkroom, bustling and purposeful. I had grown up with her pictures and was in awe of her, and also taken aback by the mismatch between the soft, deep, clear beauty of her black-and-white photos that contain every shade and grain of grey and the unassuming, unadorned figure she cut. When I started to work with her, I realised that of course she was in disguise. She wanted to be unobtrusive, even invisible: unseen, all the better to see. It was how she got to take her intimate photographs of the Beatles in their dressing room, never bettered by anyone: she melted into the background and they accepted her there and were glad to have her. But she knew how to get to the front of a queue and her elbows were sharp. Week after week, year after year, she would always get her picture. And it never became a mannerism, never a gimmick.  When we set out to do a job, Jane would often say, like a child on an outing: “Isn’t this fun?” She was game, would go anywhere. This was where she was happy: a journey that would lead to a moment of brief, intense fulfilment. I remember going to interview Pete Postlethwaite with her. He was shooting a film and we ended up clambering over stiles to get to a muddy field, the wind damp and cold and the waiting long. Jane, her shoes wet through, was sturdily cheerful. We ate crisps and watched him doing the same scene over and over again before she could take her photographs. And then, all of a sudden, she was no longer the small, apologetic woman, vague and cheerfully flustered; she had gleaming eyes, a stubborn mouth and an air of utter determination and concentration. In that instant she was like a bird of prey, all focus. Click. She would always know when she’d “got” it. “That’s the one,” she’d say, and take no more. And she was invariably right. She never used lights or expensive equipment. She never waited to screw on zoom lenses or set up a tripod. A digital camera would have been unthinkable, colour out of the question. She never posed her subjects or told them to smile. She never researched them and didn’t know when she set out what she wanted; she waited until she saw what she needed.  But what did Jane need? I’ve come to believe over the years that she had an unerring instinct for that which is unguarded and authentic in a person, which is why her photographs are so democratic and why she belonged to the Observer. She photographed toffs and people in slums, she photographedthe famous and the unknown, those in great distress and those full of gladness and success, and she saw beyond richness, poverty, status and the lack of it, to the human heart. Betjeman roaring with laughter; Beckett (whom she ran down outside the Royal Court and whose iconic portrait she did in under 30 seconds) fierce and surprised; Sinéad O’Connor vulnerable, stubble head exactly matching the tip of her cigarette; Björk, sloe eyes behind spread fingers and you can’t see her mouth but I think she’s smiling; Jean Cocteau; Desmond Tutu; Edna O’Brien; Truman Capote; Diana Dors; Orson Welles; Elizabeth II; that beguiling Gypsy child; that anxious schoolboy…  She could be extremely funny (there’s a fabulous picture of women arriving at a posh wedding holding on to vast flapping hats in the wind) but didn’t ever try to make people look stupid: she wanted them unguarded, not off-guard. Her photographs are never cruel or make her subjects the butt of some joke they can’t share. She takes Cilla Black, ungainly with her long legs coltishly splayed and drinking from a paper cup, all wrapped up in her limbs, and it’s not in the slightest degree humiliating, but lovable.  For a woman so modest and so shy, she could be terrifyingly bold. You can sometimes glimpse in her subjects (in the portrait of Mick Jagger, say) a look that might be one of disbelief, as if he is thinking, “Is this really happening?” Celebrities who had been photographed hundreds of times and were jaded and bored by the process would be taken by surprise by Jane, an elderly lady with grey hair and wearing a shapeless skirt who, they suddenly realised, was a bird of prey, and they were the prey. The mask would slip. And that was “it”, a moment of extraordinary intimacy, like two strangers falling in love.  She was the only photographer I ever wanted to sit in on an interview I was doing, not just because she could recede into invisibility, hands folded in her lap, placid as Miss Marple, or stealthily circle the room, eyes glinting, but also because she disarmed people. Quiet and attentive, she was someone you’d be ashamed to show off in front of, and you’d feel safe with her (although there was actually nowhere to hide). I went with Jane to talk to Stephen West, the son of Fred West and one of the most wretched and damaged individuals I have met. I think Jane made him feel – for the short time he was with her – rescued from his inheritance and himself at last.  And I have an abiding memory of interviewing Tony Benn with her. It was shortly after his beloved wife had died and the three of us sat in his study with mugs of tea. Before Jane arrived, Benn was courteous and articulate, answering my questions fully, statesmanlike and obviously in control; after Jane came, he visibly softened, almost melted. They seemed to glow at each other, these two remarkable people in the kindness of their later years. He took us into the garden to show us the bench on which he had proposed to his wife and had bought as a memorial. Later, we all cried together. Jane, always a quiet woman, had said very little, but her presence had unlocked something in him. She recognised sorrow; recognition can be a form of healing.  Yet despite her gift for discovering what was defenceless in other people, finding the chink in their armour, Jane was exceptionally private. She carried her secrets close through her long life. She stayed in our house in Suffolk and photographed the children; I went to visit her in her lovely house in Hampshire and to the funeral of her husband, Martin. I went on many journeys with her. She could giggle like a girl and down her drinks like a man; was convivial, mischievous and often merry. But she did not disclose herself.  Behind her appearance of someone with a very home counties kind of life is another story, in which lies the hidden trauma of being unmothered. Jane was born in Dorset in 1925, out of wedlock. She was passed around between aunts and grandparents (“I was pass the parcel,” she says in Looking for Light, the beautiful and tender film that her great friend and enabler Luke Dodd made this year with Michael Whyte, and “I was like a brown paper parcel, with the string unravelling”). Only when she was 12 did she discover that one of those aunts, Aunt Daisy, was in fact her mother. This was what Dodd calls her “unresolved sadness” and is perhaps a key to both her intensely private nature and also the miraculous intuition of her work, in which she finds people out with her seeing eye and her camera lens. She joined the Wrens in the war, then enrolled to do a photography course at Guildford School of Art. For two terms, nothing happened there; she looked out of a window and dreamed. Then, using a Rolleiflex bought for £50 with borrowed money, she took her photograph of a cow’s eye and in that eye she discovered herself.  The Observer found Jane in 1949 and Jane found her home, the one she was to belong to for 65 years. When she married Martin Moss, it was the paper’s editor, David Astor, who gave her away. She lived in the country half the time, a wife and a mother to her three children, but the Observer was always her second family. She had an enduring love for it and a deep loyalty; through her camera and her beloved newspaper she found the stability and sense of belonging her childhood had so lacked. Even after she could no longer work she would come to the newspaper and sit peacefully in the lobby. She worked hard and with tenacity and her apologetic and self-effacing air masked an indomitable, unquenchable spirit. Her death marks the end of an era. It is hard to believe we will never see her again, with her basket, shy smile and bright, watching eye. But we will remember her: tough, sweet, shy, bold, loyal, funny, solitary, complicated and mysterious. And the pictures she took will not let us forget. In Looking for Light, one interviewee describes Jane as looking at her subject through the lens and suddenly saying: “Ah, there you are!”  And there you are, dear Jane Bown. There you will always be.
The legacy of a shy, self-effacing and funny woman who worked for the Observer for more than 60 years is an astounding gallery of black and white portraits, writes Nicci Gerrard