Jane Bown repeatedly describes the Observer as "my home" in this affectionate and somewhat wistful account of her rise to prominence as a portrait photographer of legend and renown. Those unfamiliar with Bown's life story will instantly recognise her images of everyone from Samuel Beckett to Mick Jagger, Björk, PJ Harvey, the Queen and more. The key to her success, it seems, is an unfussy generosity toward her subjects that enables them to relax and thereby reveal more of themselves than they had perhaps expected. Interviewees such as the often taciturn Don McCullin talk warmly of Bown's misleadingly unassuming presence, her diminutive stature and wicker-basket manner hiding an insightful and probing eye that seems to cut through to the very heart of the matter.

"Some people take photographs," she is often quoted as saying. "I find them." Yet on this evidence there is little accidental about Bown's work, which employs precisely orchestrated monochrome hues to finely focused effect. Conversations with her son, Hugo, trace still unresolved threads of self-doubt back to a dislocated childhood, and find the subject worrying about her own possible acts of unkindness in a manner that suggests compassion for everyone but herself. As for the photographs, they are presented without aural accompaniment, allowed (indeed demanding) to speak for themselves.