This is a story I heard from Jane Bown herself on a number of occasions. 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. 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. He was tall and remote she was short but dauntless. “You can have a minute,” he announced, fiercely asserting the superiority of drama to journalism. 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. “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.
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