When David Astor became editor of the Observer in 1948, the 8 page paper was not renowned for its photography, the majority of illustrations were revenue generating advertisements. Astor decided to change that. He immediately appointed Mechthild Nawiasky as the paper’s first dedicated picture editor, poaching her from Lilliput magazine. The vehicle for visual change was to be original portraiture and the introduction of the standalone photograph.
The following year, Nawiasky hired photojournalist Michael Peto and, having seen the potential in her student portfolio, introduced Jane Bown to the Observer. These two appointments were to be key in establishing the Observer as the destination for quality photography for decades to come.
Standalones were to inform or entertain without the need for lengthy text. The images were to hold the readers attention and bring a different, essential, element to the paper. They would reveal humanity and elevate the mundane.
Initially Nawiasky plundered Bown’s portfolio and Peto’s back catalogue for striking images of people, still lifes, moments captured on their travels. Often, the subject matter was of the dignified poor and the noble working-classes, chiming with Nawiasky’s left-wing sensibilities. These images were often from a world that the readership of the Observer would never witness or be party to. To supplement the largely domestic imagery, Nawiasky utilised the contacts she had built up while working alongside Lilliput’s founder, the hugely influential Hungarian photojournalist Stefan Lorant. She brought readers images from abroad by great photographers such as Brassaï and Henri Cartier Bresson.
Jane Bown said in August 2000: “Mechthild’s magic was that she would have such an untidy desk and pull out a photograph by Cartier Bresson. She was very international. She had a magic wand which she’d wave to produce something.”
Once a photograph had been selected, it was time for someone to write a caption. Bown recalled “I remember the extraordinary situation of Cyril Dunne writing a caption for the Cow’s Eye. Mechthild would choose a picture and then run around trying to get someone to write a caption for it.” The results were sometimes poetic, sometimes enigmatic, but always a triumph.
Not everyone was happy. In 2000, the great street photographer Roger Mayne wrote to me of his earlier frustration: “When Mechthild Nawiasky was picture editor she only used photographs from stock, mostly of the street scenes. She did not think my work fitted the Observer house style and explained that it had taken her two years to train Jane Bown to work in that way. However, she did like my work and made a special effort to make it fit in. I enclose a cutting with her invented caption. A photograph from the previous year - it was awkward that Guy Fawkes day ‘56 fell on a Monday.”
As the years passed the Observer, under Astor’s editorship, cemented its reputation as an influential global newspaper, campaigning against the death penalty, championing human rights and highlighting the plight of black Africans. The reliance on the domestic standalone became anachronistic. David Astor recalled: “I remember a particular picture led to a protest. It was the picture of an old fashioned train, a steam train going through some woodland. It was just a romantic picture. It had no news merit. The Managing Editor came to me and said that this was going too far”.
Something had to give. The pace of change did not suit Nawiasky’s considered approach and, in 1957, she left.
By the beginning of the 1960s, three factors changed the look of the Observer. The invention of Nikon’s first SLR camera, the Nikon F, the rise of photo agencies with improved transmission capabilities covering foreign news and the arrival at the Tudor Street offices of a swathe of young British photojournalists including, Don McCullin, Colin Jones, Philip Jones Griffiths and David Newell-Smith. Now, as a matter of course, photographers covered the news with reporters and foreign stories could be easily illustrated. The standalone became an embellishment rather than a staple.
Of course, Jane Bown would continue to conjure up memorable images to break up the news cycle. Other photographers would, from time to time, produce beautiful standalone images to grace the pages, but the halcyon days of the standalone were gone.
Today in print, with fewer pages to fill as the industry falls prey to the internet, the standalone exists primarily to fill a space above an awkward advert. It is usually a photograph of a pretty girl at a music festival or a crowded beach on the south coast. No longer the majesty of the street urchin or the Pearly King.
Patrick O’Donovan wrote specifically about Jane Bown’s cow’s eye photograph in his introduction to a collection of her work, 1980’s The Gentle Eye, but spoke to the genre: “The very idea of such a picture sounds absurd...But this idea of a picture, at once eccentric and blindingly simple, sticks. I saw it first many years ago and I recall it more easily than some of the great images of war and death made in photography.”
He said, “It is possible to produce the greatest photography while working for a newspaper,” and sometimes a poetic caption is all you need.
