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The light administrative duties (downloading files, having welcome exchanges with my London-based curator/editor friend Luke Dodd) required to curate this issue of DIVISION/Review cannot detract from the gravity and honor of introducing Jane Bown's images to a highly specific audience such as ours. Although little known on this side of the Atlantic, Bown is familiar to older readers of London's The Observer with her portraiture and reportage growing in reputation as the specialized role of photojournalist becomes redundant in the continued democratization of the imaging device or camera. A “Wren” (Women's Royal Naval Service) during World War II, Bown's life path was radically diverted by wedding photography and she was soon contributing to the The Observer in that black and white postwar decade of deprivation, enforced austerity, and delayed PTSD on a national level. There is a brief scene in the 2017 film Phantom Thread where the neurotic fashion designer played by Daniel Day Lewis is photographed gazing upon his most recent muse in a bustling Cecil Beaton-esque studio of the same period. Bown operated in an opposite world. Her portraiture had a job to do and a deadline to meet, necessitating immediate productive encounters with limited access to her subjects, a “who's who” of politics, entertainment, literature, and other cultural personages. Bown acknowledged that her conventional appearance and mild manner allowed her subjects to drop their reserve and to give her what she needed, unlike our Diane Arbus, who disliked commercial assignments and psychically exhausted her sitters into submission. Bown was beloved by many. Andy Warhol's assistant in the 1960s and the Factory doorman poet/photographer Gerard Malanga (while not quite in Bown's league) stated that rather than taking an image, one is given it by the subject, an exchange continually recognized in reviewing Bown's extensive corpus. I am personally intrigued by the mythic characters that populated London