“I only had a minute.” Jane Bown, the Observer’s greatest postwar photographer, used to tell the story of the day she was sent to the Royal Court theatre to photograph Samuel Beckett, acclaimed author of Waiting For Godot. Bown was renowned for snatching photographs against the odds, but the shy, unsmiling, and nervously intense figure of Beckett, compared by one friend to an “Aztec eagle”, presented a rare challenge. “You can have a minute,” he announced, fiercely asserting the superiority of drama to journalism.
He was tall and remote; she was short but dauntless. In the half-lit alleyway outside the stage door, Bown positioned her reluctant celebrity against the wall, and fired off barely a dozen shots, later remembering the arctic blue intensity of Beckett’s eyes. After the prescribed minute of photographic concentration, she packed up her Leica, thanked him for his time, and fled, hoping that she’d got a usable frame. This is a story I heard from Jane Bown herself on a number of occasions. In the making of the radio programme on which this article is based, every other quotation either comes from the Beckett Foundation or was specially recorded for the BBC.
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