The John Rylands Library's special collections department has acquired 110 prints form the photography Dorothy Bohm (1924-2023). The work highlights the formative period Bohm spent in Manchester, developing her professional practice, and commemorates the 2010 exhibition of her work at Manchester Art Gallery. The collection includes:
- Almost 100 black and white portrait photographs taken at Studio Alexander
- Ephemera relating to Studio Alexander and Dorothy Bohm’s life in Manchester in the 1940s
- 11 colour photographs taken in Manchester between 2008 and 2010
- Ephemera relating to the retrospective exhibition of Dorothy’s work at Manchester Art Gallery in 2010
- Original negatives of both bodies of work
Anne Anderton, Senior Special Collections Curator with responsibility for Visual Collections told BPH: 'It is a wonderful insight into Bohm’s formative period spent here in Manchester before she went on to a significant international career. It is currently being catalogued but is open to researchers by application. Additionally, a good number of print volumes that were part of Dorothy Bohm’s personal library are now catalogued can be found in our library search.'
Born in 1924, Dorothy was sent to England in 1939 to escape the rise of Nazism. She first arrived in Sussex, later moving to Manchester, where her brother was studying. There she met Louis Bohm, a Polish student who would become her husband in 1945. Bohm studied photography at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology and after graduation, she worked for four years with photographer Samuel Cooper before opening her own portrait studio, Studio Alexander, on Market Street in Manchester in 1946. Her studio work supported her husband while he completed his PhD. In the years that followed, Bohm and her husband travelled extensively and she eventually sold the studio in 1958.
Anne also told BPH that the library had very recently acquired a magnificent set of Suffragette photographs which will be available shortly.
See more detail here.
Image: © Estate of Dorothy Bohm.
Comments