(Dorothy Bohm's photographs capture the contradictions of ...)
Dorothy Bohm's photographs capture the contradictions of London today: the juxtaposition of old and new, of tradition and modernity, which often produces a jumbled urban landscape. This is for the most part the London which tourists do not see, the hidden corners where people go about their everyday lives, observed by the photographer with sensitivity and humour.
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.
Background
Dorothy Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in 1924 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russian Federation), to a German-speaking family of Jewish-Lithuanian origins. From 1932 to 1939 she lived with her family in Lithuania, first in Memel (now Klaipėda) and later in Šiauliai.
Education
Dorothy Bohm was sent to England in 1939 to escape Nazism: first to a boarding school in Ditchling, Sussex, but London soon to Manchester, where her brother was a student, and where she met Louis Bohm (whom she would marry in 1945).
She studied photographic technology at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology, from 1940 to 1942, obtaining City and Guilds final Certificate in Photography, in addition to her graduate diploma.
Career
Dorothy Bohm 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. (She would sell the studio in 1958.)
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.
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.
Quotations:
"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."
Connections
Dorothy Bohm has two daughters, one of whom, Monica Bohm-Duchen, is an art historian and curator.
Spouse:
Louis Bohm
Daughter:
Monica Bohm-Duchen
Daughter:
Yvonne
References
Walls & Windows: Colour Photography by Dorothy Bohm
The theme of Walls and Windows encompasses a wide range of subject matter: mannequins in shop windows, fragments of torn posters, shop fronts, urban building sites. Despite their diversity, the photographs in this collection display some of the central preoccupations of Dorothy Bohm's work: an acute sense of observation for the detail of everyday life; a fascination with surfaces and reflections, and an eye for painterly textures; a subtle, often witty exploration of spatial ambiguity; and the ability to capture the moment, to encapsulate in a single image the mood of a place.
A World Observed 1940-2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm
The accompanying book, the most detailed and comprehensive to date, is also the first publication of its kind. Lavishly illustrated with numerous full-page reproductions of the photographs displayed at the exhibition, as well as others not exhibited, the book contains three substantial essays, which cover Bohm's life, her work within the history of photography and visual culture, and her status as a female photographer. The work concludes with an extensive and easy-to-use index of thumbnail reproductions of her work.