Dorothy Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia, to a German-speaking family of Jewish-Lithuanian origin. From 1932 to 1939 she lived with her family in Lithuania, first in Memel (now Klaipėda) 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 whom she would marry in 1945. She travelled extensively with her husband’s work, briefly living in Paris, San Francisco and New York. But she settled in London in 1956 and came to consider herself a Londoner, living the rest of her long life at the same address in Church Row, Hampstead.
Bohm studied photography in Manchester and from there worked under the photographer Samuel Cooper for four years until she set up her own portrait studio. But by the late 1950s, she had abandoned studio portraiture in favour of street photography and as she said would often just “take her camera on a walk” wherever she went. Like Nigel Henderson it was this environment which she came to love best, and it has been noted by her writer and art historian daughter, Monica Bohm-Duchen, that 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.”
Bohm said of her own work: “I photograph the humble, the anonymous - those who are spontaneous and mirror all of us.” Unlike the staged celebrity photographs of Terry O’Neill and Michael Ward that give us the flavour of the glamour of the ‘swinging sixties’, Bohm has helpfully documented the street version. In her work, particularly in London in the mid-1960s to early 1970s, we can see how the impact of pop culture was seeping through into the streets.
Her images were included in more than 30 exhibitions over the subsequent decades, in Paris, Jerusalem, Milan and Berlin, and at British galleries including the Royal Photographic Society gallery and the Victoria and Albert museum. As she said: “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.” Bohm died in London in March 2023, at the age of 98.
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