Looking for Light: Jane Bown (2014) Online

Now aged 89, Jane Bown has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a photographer - mostly with the London Observer newspaper. Luke Dodd and Michael Whyte's documentary looks at her career, focusing in particular on her abilities to uncover her subjects while making them feel entirely at ease. The film also traces Bown's turbulent origins - as an illegitimate daughter, she never knew her father and was taken away from her mother at an early age. Since then she has always been in search of a stable family, both at home and in work; hence her fondness for working for the Observer family, especially under the benevolent paternalism of David Astor. Sometimes the documentary feels a bit like a memory-fest, where the directors drag out familiar faces - Polly Toynbee, Nobby Clark, Edna O'Brien - to contribute their reminiscences of working with Bown; but the filmmakers have done a creditable job in conjuring up a vanished world of print journalism. However the narrative is particularly slack in structure; there are too many interruptions where examples of Bown's photography are shown, as if to confirm her past reputation as someone engaged to work with the biggest stars. Perhaps the documentary might have benefited from some more contextual information, especially for viewers unacquainted with the "hot metal" days of newspaper production of which Bown was such a notable part. Nonetheless, LOOKING FOR LIGHT offers a generally sympathetic portrait of a once-great photographer now sadly affected with the beginnings of Alzheimer's Disease.

This marvellously subtle profile of photographer Jane Bown conveys how she combined a self-effacing presence (the opposite of what you expect a Fleet Street photographer to be) with what Bown describes as "a sharp pair of elbows". The film allows you to enjoy Bown's greatest images in silence while situating her in her social context: a now-vanished world of print journalism, where the editors and owners were from the officer class, and the journalists and photographers were often regarded as NCOs or lower ranks. There is also a sub-text about a talented woman, never quite sure who her parents were and passed around "like a parcel", who adopted The Observer as her family. And the film conveys poignantly how encroaching Alzheimer's can render childhood memories more vivid than this weeks's events. Bown looks back on sixty years of photo-journalism and celebrities - from The Beatles to Sam Beckett to the Queen - still looking for the light.