#bohm

A photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things disappearing. In photography I have tried to create order out of chaos, to find stability in flux and beauty in the most unlikely places.

- Dorothy Bohm

Dorothy Bohm was one of the last doyennes of post-war British photography; in a career spanning eight decades, she befriended photographers from Bill Brandt to Martin Parr, helped to develop the Photographers’ Gallery in London and created a large body of humanistic work characterised by a peripatetic lifestyle and an empathetic eye for women and children at work and play.

Her photographs - often full of joy and serenity - belied a life scarred by tragedy. As a Jewish teenager, born in Königsberg, in East Prussia, during the 1930s, she had grown up in the shadow of the Nazi threat. Eventually, for safety, she was sent to join her brother in Britain. However her family were separated by the war. She did not see her parents or younger sister again for two decades: they were taken by the Soviets and her father incarcerated in a harsh labour camp in Siberia.

At the end of the war, Dorothy opened a portrait studio in Manchester. But she soon outgrew the sterility of such photographs. By the late 1950s she rejected studio portraiture for so-called ‘street photography.’ With her husband Louis Bohm (a fellow émigré from Nazi Europe, whom she met when they were both students in Manchester) she travelled widely, and her work of this period provides fascinating insights into the changing face of post-war Europe, as well as the USA, the USSR and Israel.

It was here she found her true place in the art of photography. Her photographs captured everyday interludes often of the working classes: women at fruit and flower stalls in Switzerland and Belgium, resting shoppers in Cordoba, street market browsers on Petticoat Lane Market in London and concierges on a break in the Marais. The men in her pictures were largely benign figures: racing punters at Goodwood, poor struggling painters in Montmartre in the 1950s.

She is known for her black and white photography but she only truly turned to colour polaroid photos in the 1980s. But what remained central was the human figure in its natural setting is still the primary focus of her work and she continues to use photography in its purest, un-manipulated form, her approach had become more painterly and allusive, with an ever greater interest in spatial and other forms of ambiguity.

She had her first solo show in 1969 at the ICA, where her exhibition, “People at Peace”, was juxtaposed with “The Destruction Business”, a selection of Don McCullin’s war photography. Her first photobook, A World Observed, was published the following year.

Her photographic output decreased during the 1970s as she helped to build the reputation of the Photographers’ Gallery, which opened in 1971 in a former Lyons Tea Room in Covent Garden. As an associate director for 15 years, she worked on exhibitions of veteran snappers and emerging talents such as Sarah Moon and Colin Jones. She photographed well into her 90s, often around her neighbourhood in Hampstead, continuing to capture quiet, dignified moments. A photograph, she said, “makes transience less painful”.

In her later years, Dorothy Bohm reflected that England had been her salvation. “It’s the best country, I can tell you that, and I’ve lived in a number of them,” she noted, “Why? Because of the people.” Photography for her, as she would confess in countless interviews, was essentially a coping mechanism for loss, “I am temperamentally suited to being a photographer. You can only make a picture of something that exists, right? And for me that was quite important. I wanted to capture time. My background completely disappeared.”