Dorothy Bohm (née Dorothea Israelit) was born on 22 June 1924 in Königsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia). In 1932 the family settled in Memel (now Klaipeda, Lithuania) to escape the rising threat of Nazism. In June 1939, her parents sent her to the safety of England, which would remain her home thereafter.
In 1940, Dorothy enrolled on a vocational photography course at Manchester College of Technology, and between 1942 and 1945 worked as an assistant at a leading portrait studio in that city. Following her marriage to fellow refugee Louis Bohm in late 1945, she established her own portrait studio – Studio Alexander – in central Manchester. In 1947 a visit to Ascona in the Ticino region of Switzerland prompted her to work outside the studio for the first time, and from then on she would travel extensively.
In 1954, the couple relocated to Paris for a year, and in 1956 paid an extended visit to the USA. On their return to England, they settled in Hampstead in northwest London. Two years later Bohm decided to sell her Manchester studio in order to concentrate exclusively on her deeply humanist and empathetic street photography.
Bohm’s first solo exhibition took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1969. In 1971 she was closely involved with the founding in Covent Garden of the pioneering Photographers’ Gallery and served as its Associate Director for the next fifteen years.
She started working in colour in the early 1980s (although this was preceded in the mid-1950s by a small number of colour images taken in the USA and Mexico) and in the mid-1980s abandoned black and white photography completely.
Bohm’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in a number of public collections in the UK, including Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of London and the National Portrait Gallery. A major retrospective was held at Manchester Art Gallery in 2010, and further exhibitions and publications have followed, consolidating her reputation as one of the doyennes of British photography. She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2009.
Dorothy died on 15 March 2023, aged ninety-eight, closely engaged with her photography to the end.
