100 Artists #03
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.”
So said Dorothea Bohm,born in Königsberg, Germany in 1924 who fled first with her family to Lithuania and then to England alone in 1939, where she was sent for her safety by her parents.
On departure her father gave her his precious Leica camera.
In 1940 she enrolled on a vocational photographic course at the Manchester College of Technology, where she met her future husband, Polish-Jewish chemistry student Louis Bohm. There her talent was quickly recognised and, on completion of her studies, she was awarded a prize for portraiture and invited to teach evening classes at the college.
Afterwards, she worked as an assistant at Samuel Cooper’s portrait photography studio in Manchester (1942–45) and then set up her own studio in the city, later moving to London.
Her passion was for street photography, capturing the transformation of London from the 1960s onwards.
The Photographers’ Gallery opened in Covent Garden in 1971 and Bohm served as its Associate Director for the next 15 years. During this time, she continued to develop her own practice, experimenting with colour polaroid photography for the first time in the early 1980s and, in the middle of that decade, abandoning black-andwhite photography completely. In due course she adopted a more abstract, spatially ambiguous, and painterly approach, evidenced in her many photographs of torn posters.
Since 1970, more than 15 books have been published on her oeuvre. Her work has been exhibited widely and a major retrospective was held at Manchester Art Gallery in 2010, as well as two major exhibitions in 2016: Dorothy Bohm: Sixties London at the Jewish Museum London, and Unseen London, Paris, New York, 1930s–60s: Photographs by Wolfgang Suschitzky, Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert at Ben Uri Gallery.
Dorothy (as she became known) Bohm continues to live and work in Hampstead.