Dorothy Bohm


Dorothy Bohm is a photographer based in London, known for her portraiture, street photography, early adoption of colour, and photography of London and Paris; she is considered one of the doyennes of British photography.

Life and career

Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in 1924 in Königsberg, East Prussia, to a German-speaking family of Jewish-Lithuanian origins. From 1932 to 1939 she lived with her family in Lithuania, first in Memel and later in Šiauliai. She was sent to England in 1939 to escape Nazism: first to a boarding school in Ditchling, Sussex, but soon to Manchester, where her brother was a student, and where she met Louis Bohm.
Dorothy Bohm studied photography at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology, from which she received a diploma; she also received a certificate in photography from City and Guilds. She had worked under the photographer Samuel Cooper for four years until she set up her own portrait studio, Studio Alexander, in 1946 using her nom de guerre Dorothy Alexander. Samples from this early portrait work would be exhibited decades later.
Bohm's husband worked for a petrochemical company that obliged him to move around the world. In 1947 she made the first of several visits to Paris, where she lived with her husband from 1954 to 1955. In the 1950s she also lived in New York and San Francisco, in 1956 travelling to Mexico, where she photographed in colour for the first time. She has lived in Hampstead since 1956.
By the late 1950s, Dorothy Bohm had abandoned studio portraiture in favour of 'street photography', but was still working predominantly in black and white; in 1980 she was persuaded by André Kertész to experiment with colour, which she did for two years using a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera. She used colour negative film from 1984, and from 1985 worked exclusively in colour.
This early work of Bohm's has been described by Monica Bohm-Duchen as ‘humanist street photography, capturing the moment in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson’ whilst ‘people are often surprised by the youth and vibrancy of her colour work. She focuses on fragments of the urban landscape. . . that are otherwise overlooked. These photographs have an abstract quality; there's a deliberate spatial ambiguity and you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at. But nothing is manipulated – she will still only work with film.’
A major 1969 exhibition in the Institute of Contemporary Arts of photography by Bohm, Don McCullin, Tony Ray-Jones and Enzo Ragazzini drew a response that encouraged one of its organizers, Sue Davies, to embark on a photography gallery for London. In 1971, Bohm co-founded The Photographers' Gallery in London with Davies; she worked as its Associate Director for the next 15 years, making many friends among the notable photographers who exhibited there. She visited South Africa for five weeks in 1974, later exhibiting photographs taken there. With Helena Kovac, she also founded the Focus Gallery for Photography in 1998; the gallery closed in 2004. She was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in November 2009.
Bohm has two daughters, one of whom, Monica Bohm-Duchen, is an art historian and curator.
Dorothy Bohm has said about her work:
The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transience less painful and retains something of the special magic, which I have looked for and found. I have tried to create order out of chaos, to find stability in flux and beauty in the most unlikely places.

Publications

Solo

May & June 2019 – Colour Photographs by Dorothy Bohm and AVIVSON GALLERY IN HIGHGATE, LONDON

Group