Jane Bown's increased frailty towards the end of her lengthy career forced the photographer to relax a life-long prohibition on having anybody extraneous with her on a shoot so occasionally I would get the call to accompany her. When I first got to know Jane in 2001, she still came to the Observer office on a Thursday and Friday as she had done for half a century and sat dutifully at her desk waiting for an assignment, surrounded by numerous filing cabinets that contained her life's work. I had come to the Guardian and Observer to set up an archive, to which, in an extraordinarily generous gesture, Jane agreed to donate her entire "back catalogue".
As our friendship deepened, Jane began to talk more and more about her early life and I could sense that there was an unresolved sadness back there. The trigger for this reflectiveness was, I think, the prospect of being parted from the thousands of carefully filed negatives, contact strips and prints that she had amassed over the best part of six decades working across all areas of photo-journalism. That, and an acknowledgment that she would not be able to take photographs indefinitely – she was in her late 70s at the time.
Jane prefers silence to talking – her mantra has always been, "photographers should neither be seen nor heard". Her slight stature made it easy for her to blend into the surroundings, always vigilant and observing from the periphery. And all the time her eyes are scanning, darting here and there like those of a small bird. Over a coffee one day, she showed me a picture of her as a very young child beaming out of a flowering rhododendron, adding with a certain pride: "As you can see, I was a very contented and well-behaved child." As before, she mentioned aunts and grandparents – but there was no mention of parents. Born out of wedlock in 1925, she was passed around maternal aunts, "it was like pass the parcel", until one day when she was 12 she realised that Aunt Daisy, her favourite, was in fact her mother. Gradually, as she revealed more, I came to understand that this early trauma in some fundamental way provided the key to Jane's work. She tentatively agreed to do an interview despite her reluctance to talk about herself and her work, not to mention her extreme discomfort at being filmed. I contacted an old friend, the film-maker Michael Whyte, for help. Jane liked and trusted his quietness and integrity from the outset. In 2005 we travelled to her house in Hampshire and in a barn at the back of the house, which she had fitted out as a kind of private gallery, she talked candidly about her childhood, her family and professional life.
She became a photographer in 1946 when, as a recently demobbed Wren, she applied, on a whim, to the UK's only full-time photography course at the Guildford School of Art. Although she didn't own a camera and had never taken a picture and the course was already over-subscribed, its director, Ifor Thomas, accepted her as he had also worked in the navy during the war. Painfully shy, she sat looking out of the window for the first two terms and the teacher almost gave up on her. With £50 borrowed from an aunt, Jane purchased her first camera, a Rolleiflex, and the world came into focus. She still talks of these early photos – abstract studies, still-lives, Gypsy children, fairgrounds, farm-workers – as her best work, adding, "I was never really interested in people or portraits – that came later … I was happiest moving about seeing things, still am. These pictures are the real me."
Again and again, she referred to the Observer as her "home", saying she never had any desire to work anywhere else. David Astor, the proprietor and editor, took her under his wing – he even gave her away at her wedding. She carried on a kind of double life; most of the week, she lived as "Mrs Moss" with her husband and three children in the home counties, travelling to London for two days, where she became "Jane Bown". Tellingly, apart from the private gallery in the barn, there were no examples of her work anywhere on view in her house, as if in acknowledgment of the fact that photography was, for her, a deeply private activity.
She claimed that her portrait photography came about because of her reputation for working rapidly and for mastering the most adverse circumstances or awkward individuals. An ideal shoot for Jane was 10 minutes, enough time to really see the subject but not enough for the initial spontaneity to disappear. She cornered the most reluctant of subjects, Samuel Beckett, in a dark alley down the side of the Royal Court theatre as he tried to give her the slip. His enmity is palpable but he stood long enough for her to expose five frames. It was all over in less than 30 seconds – the middle frame is now regarded as the archetypal Beckett portrait.
With a very vague idea about how to proceed with our Bown project, Michael and I began to approach some of Jane's peers, subjects, colleagues, and family to begin to build up a picture of this most elusive of photographers. Apart from the earlier interview the obvious starting point was Jane's considerable body of work, and it quickly became evident that this would exert a big influence on the aesthetic of the film. When I showed her an early cut she claimed to "hate" it and then added, "but I know it was made with love".
Photographs have an inherent sadness, they appear to arrest time when in fact all they do, ultimately, is draw attention to its passing. An intuitive understanding of sadness informs all of Jane's work, which is maybe why she only works in black and white. Photographs are her way of negotiating the world – as much the act of taking them as the finished product. To be in a strange room with a complete stranger once or twice a week gave her a fix. She admits that, for the brief moment when she looks at somebody through the lens, she feels an intense love for them. And then she's gone.
• Looking for Light: Jane Bown is out this week. The DVD is out on 26 May. An exhibition of Bown's work runs at Kings Place, London N1, until 31 May.
