Jane Bown exposed: on photographing Beckett, Björk and the Beatles guardian.co.uk

The most surprising aspect of Jane Bown's house – aside from its striking elegance – is the absence of her photographs. The 18th-century Hampshire home of Britain's greatest portrait photographer is spacious and impeccably furnished, with windows that look down on a vast garden – or a nature reserve, as she describes it. Its walls are dominated by historic prints and paintings and its grand piano cluttered with pictures of her children – Hugo, Matthew and Louisa – and other relatives.

But evidence that you are in the presence of one of the greats of 20th-century photography is notably missing – until you are directed down a hallway to the furthest part of the house, where Jane has ferreted away some of her favourite images. This is the Bown hall of fame: a laughing Mick Jagger, a mini-skirted Cilla Black drinking tea, a happy-looking Gordon Brown and a group of photographs of everyday life in 20th-century Britain. These pictures have their place in her life but it is clear, from their position, that they do not rule it. Friends and family matter above all to Jane, to the extent that most of my day with her last month was dominated by gossip about old colleagues. Her observations were typically sharp and to the point.

In fact, Jane's home is remarkable for another, very different reason. Two hundred years ago it was owned by Frank Austen, whose novelist sister certainly visited here many times – a rather apposite connection given the role played by both Janes in recording the society of their times. In the case of Bown, she created, over six decades, an unforgettable portfolio of portraits of stars and politicians: from the great and the good – Ted Heath, Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen – to the slippery and treacherous (think of Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby and Richard Nixon); and from the jovial and witty – men like John Benjamin and Robbie Coltrane – to the serious and sophisticated: Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell and Orson Welles.

Most of her subjects she liked, and only a handful get poor marks today. Robert Redford was good looking but boring, Paul McCartney "a bit pompous". The remainder, including Thatcher and Nixon, are fondly recalled. She relished them and often they revered her. Jean Cocteau even sent her a letter enclosing love and best wishes from his cat, Madeleine.

This month a selection of Jane's best works are published in Exposures, a book of photographs that have been carefully edited and restored by her friend and colleague Luke Dodd. The result is testimony to the eye of a great photographer.

Jane Bown was born in 1925 in Eastnor, Herefordshire, "on the wrong side of the blanket," as she puts it. Her mother was a private nurse who was caring for a local man and ended up becoming pregnant by him. "He was posh, I suppose. His family had land. That's as much as I know about him." Nothing came of the relationship in any case and Jane was quickly dispatched to the care of her mother's sisters, who lived in Devon and were all named after plants: Primrose, Daisy, Violet, Iris and Ivy. Thus her childhood passed in the care of a variety of different women who moved her from one to another as if passing a parcel, she says.

It was not an easy upbringing. However, Jane remains defiant and says she has only occasional moments of wistfulness. "I have spent my life thinking how things might have turned out. I have been left with question marks. I still don't know the whole story of my birth. On the other hand, it was the best background that I could have had for being a photographer. I was a loner. I had freedom."

In 1942, she joined the Wrens and worked as a chart-corrector for naval operations, including the D-Day landings. Then, at the end of the war, Jane – who was now 21 – was given a grant to go to college, though she had no idea what to study. "I looked at the lists of courses, saw photography, picked it and managed to get into Guildford College. On the first day, we were all told to go out and take photographs. I didn't know how to. I had never held a camera before."

She flourished nevertheless, and her Guildford tutor, Ifor Thomas, advised her to put together a portfolio of photographs to hawk round London picture agencies. A few assignments followed, but not much, until, out of the blue, she received a telegram telling her to photograph Bertrand Russell the following morning. The resulting picture of the philosopher in haughty profile – taken while he was eating his breakfast in a London hotel – appeared in 1949 in The Observer, for whom Jane was to take photographs for the next six decades.

Over the next few years, she developed her distinctive style. She bought an Olympus camera with an 85mm lens, and set it, invariably, at a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second with the aperture at f2.8. This combination of wide aperture on a close-up lens produced a very thin depth of field. So by focusing on her subject's head and, in particular, their eyes, she caught their faces in a way that isolated them, sharply, against hazy backgrounds. At the same time, she made sure the light caught her subject's eyes. Just look at those images: Margaret Thatcher, Richard Harris, Francis Bacon. Each personality is caught by a glittering eye.

Decades later, she was still using her faithful Olympus because she was "supremely uninterested in photographic technology, accepting her camera's limitations as imposing a necessary discipline on her image-making," as Germaine Greer has observed.

Most of her photographs were taken in sessions that lasted no more than 15 minutes. She had no props and turned up carrying only a shopping bag with her camera in it. Annie Leibovitz she wasn't. Even exposure meters were shunned. "I just looked at the light on the back of my hand and judged it that way." Thus Bown perfected minimalist photography: the same camera, the same lens, the same setting, but no flash or exposure meter. In this way she was left free to concentrate on those eyes.

Her work for The Observer was mostly made up of last-minute assignments. "I'd be sent with a writer and had to take my photographs quickly so they could get on with the interview. In a typical month I might do Dennis Hopper at the Savoy, Woody Allen at the Dorchester, and a senior politician at his home. Each time, I'd have 10 minutes. So I would march straight in and take over the situation. I had a quick mind. I could suss it all out immediately."

Jane describes this routine as "swinging into attack". One minute she was a bag of nerves enraged at the poor light that day (a constant Bown refrain), by the obscurity of her subject and by the pointlessness of photographing him or her at all. The next, she had moved the startled individual to a window and had begun snapping – often before greetings were over. And woe betide those who got in her way. "I had to tell Robin Williams to stop being funny. He was playing games. I said, 'You'll have to stop. We don't have time for that.' He did – though I found out later he mimicked me after I left."

Invariably it was the first photograph or the very last image that succeeded. "The very first photograph I took of Mary Warnock was the one which made it to the paper. She marched down the path to open her gate to tell me I was late and I just snapped her there." Similarly the picture of Richard Harris, bare legged and languidly smoking, was a first. "I turned up at his room – I guess it would be at the Savoy – and there he was, smoking in his dressing gown. I said: 'Don't move. I like it as you are.'"

With Francis Bacon, it was the final photograph that worked. "He looked good in his studio, among his paints and jars, but in black and white I knew the image would be confusing. Then he got up to show me to the door and say goodbye – he was a very nice man – and there it was: marvellous light. That was the last picture I took of him: a second bite at the cherry."

Certainly when you realise the frantic pace of Bown's work, her images look particularly powerful, a triumph of speed, certainty and sheer bravura. And occasionally this rush had advantages. In 1978 Jane photographed the writer Quentin Crisp, a man who claimed he never cleaned his apartment on the grounds that, after a few years, a few extra inches of dirt made no difference. "I took him in his flat and yes, it was filthy. It was absolutely disgusting, though he was perfectly pleasant. It was good to get out quickly, nevertheless."

For Observer writers, this speed and professionalism was a godsend. She may have arrived with a shopping bag for a camera case, but she was certainly sharp and fast. Even better, as her fame grew, her name began to open doors. A few months after I joined The Observer in 1982, I was told to interview Sir Walter Marshall, then head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. I called his office but was told he was too busy. So I mentioned I would be accompanied by Jane Bown. Suddenly Sir Walter was not so busy.

Jane turned up – with two bags and an angle-poise lamp. What, I asked, was in the extra bag? Shopping, she replied slowly and carefully, as if talking to an idiot. And the lamp? "Oh that. It's the light, you know. It's terrible in winter." Once in the great man's office, Jane put the lamp on his desk and shone it straight into his face as if ready to give him the third degree. Then she started frantically clicking. I began the interview, although Sir Walter was clearly not happy. After a couple of minutes, I got a tug on my sleeve. Jane was on her knees on the floor clicking upwards. "He's really beautiful, you know. He has lovely eyes," she hissed.

Sir Walter peered over: "What did she say?" I managed a glassy sort of a grin. "Come on, come on," he snapped. "What did she say?" I took a deep breath: "You are very lovely and have beautiful eyes." He stared for a second. Then he smiled. "Oh, that's very nice of you." After this, the interview went like a dream.

On another assignment, a former Observer colleague, Judith Judd, was sent, with Jane, to travel by train from London to Southend. The service, the last with non-corridor trains in Britain, had just been voted the nation's worst. They got in a compartment and Judith began interviewing travellers until Jane announced, loudly: "This is no good, Judith. Everyone here has got a very boring face. We need to move to another compartment." Of course, this could not be done until the next station, so Judith had to sit, in ghastly silence, for 20 minutes, surrounded by slighted commuters. Jane, unconcerned, stared out of the window.

Jane is particularly proud of the images produced from these assignments – hop pickers, men and women at a holiday camp, children at a swimming pool and festival-goers at Glastonbury. (For one picture – to illustrate an article on breastfeeding – she even took a picture of my daughter Anna, then a month old, with my wife Sarah. This is the closest I have got to the Bown hall of fame.) A selection of these "ordinary" images are displayed on the right-hand wall of her study, opposite those portraits of Jagger, Thatcher, and Coltrane. "People describe me as a portrait photographer, but I am not. I am a hack," she insists.

Certainly, she knows how to play hardball. In 1978, Jane was sent to Claridge's to photograph Richard Nixon, only to find the hotel entrance besieged by a scrum of photographers. "I knew how to behave, however. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled through their legs and got in front of them all. Then Nixon came out. I called out his name. He turned, looked at me and then asked: "Got it?" I said no, so he smiled again. Then got it." The resulting image makes the man seem almost human.

One of the rare exceptions to the brevity of her assignments turned out to be her first encounter with the Beatles, in 1963. "They were stuck in a rather grubby room somewhere in East Ham. There were crowds outside, but somehow I got in. Ringo was playing patience and John was burbling about something. The light was terrible though. Then someone said I should go, but they said, 'No, we like her.'" Over the years, she did several more sessions with them. They were, she says, all great lads, despite Paul's occasional pomposity. "John was lovely. He had a camera one time and took pictures of me. I would have loved to have seen those. He was always busy – always doing something."

Jane today is uncertain on her feet, following an illness two years ago, but she remains as sharp and opinionated as ever. Not surprisingly, she has no time for digital photography nor the amount of equipment lugged around by her modern counterparts. Nevertheless, she has her favourites – in particular The Observer's Murdo McLeod, a photographer with his own singular style and approach to his subjects. He is "simply the best, fantastic", she says.

As to her own talents and photographs, she remains modest. Yes, her portraits were often striking and caught her subjects in a new and interesting light. "But I often feel that they [the subjects] were doing it, not me. I was just recognising what they were."

• Jane Bown's book, Exposures, is available from Guardian Books for £20 (RRP £30). To order, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0845 606 4232. An exhibition of her portraits will be held at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 from 23 October to 21 November and at University Gallery and Baring Wing, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne from 8 January to 19 February