Obituary: Frances Lang

Frances Lang, who died last week aged 34, first appeared in the foyer of the Independent on Sunday in the winter of 1993, when she was a photography student at the Newport School of Art and Design. She held a box of colour Xeroxes of portraits of young women chefs. She had, somehow, captured the face of a new authority in commercial kitchens. Her series of photographs was published in the Sunday Review, immediately serialised in Germany and imitated in Australia and the United States.

This began a series of highly personal contributions to the Review: ghostly Victorian water-fountains in modern settings, spooky portraits of 100-year-old bottled fish at the Natural History Museum. Her most memorable single portrait was of the Spectator's cookery writer Jennifer Paterson. Miss Paterson was on her third pink gin when Lang held the light meter to her nose. "My dear," cried Miss Paterson, "you look exactly like Audrey Hepburn!"

A month ago, looking almost embarrassingly beautiful, Frances married Mark Brand in Westminster Abbey. They were on their honeymoon when AeroPeru Flight 603 plunged into the Pacific north of Lima last Tuesday at 6.30am British time.