女摄影师群像006:Jane Bown

Jane Bown出生于1925年,英国。从1949年开始她为《the Observer》报拍照。她于2014年去世。

她拍的名人肖像似乎很有名。通常我对时尚摄影或名人肖像摄影都非常无感,但Jane Bown真的让我看到了她作为摄影师的出众之处。第一眼我被她拍的Sinéad O’Connor惊艳了。第二张打动到我的是她拍的牛眼睛。

她的传记《A lifetime of Looking》里写:”很少的正面,明显的背景虚化,光线实在不足时可能会使用一盏台灯;85 毫米和50 毫米镜头;1/60 秒快门速度;2.8大光圈是她的拍摄偏好。”

卫报的讣告里也写到她使用相机的技巧:“In stark contrast to her mostly male peers, Jane was supremely uninterested in camera equipment. With some reluctance, she abandoned her beloved Rolleiflex in the early 60s, first migrating to a 35mm Pentax before settling on the Olympus OM1 – she owned about a dozen Olympus cameras, all bought secondhand. Throughout her career, she referred to herself as a “hack”, and even when her reputation was at its height, she always deferred to the picture editor.” 还有,她不用测光而是靠直觉来运用机器,“She worked almost exclusively with natural light and ignored the camera’s in-built light meter, preferring instead to hold a clenched fist away from her body to see how the light fell on the back of her hand. In fact, Jane once admitted to me that her preferred setting was f2.8 at 1/60 second and that she would, if at all possible, conspire to make the environment work at this setting – indirect sunlight from a north-facing widow would usually achieve it.