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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.

Widely considered one of the doyennes of late twentieth-century British photography, Dorothy Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in Germany in 1924. Sent to the safety of England in 1939, she attended school in Sussex and studied photography in Manchester before setting up her own portrait studio there. In the late 1940s, inspired by a visit to the artists’ colony of Ascona in the Ticino, Switzerland, she started working outside the studio, capturing moments in ordinary lives with profound humanity and an instinctive eye for composition. Her first exhibition was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, in 1969, where she met Roland Penrose, who memorably commented that ‘her camera does not only see, it also feels.’ In the early 1970s Dorothy was involved with the founding of The Photographers’ Gallery in London, where alongside founder Sue Davies, she helped introduce a British public to the great names of contemporary photography, as well as to nurture the careers of younger photographers.

In the mid-1980s Dorothy abandoned black and white photography for colour, infusing her images with texture and spatial ambiguity to convey humanity in increasingly abstract and allusive forms. Dorothy Bohm died in March 2023 at the age of nearly 99. She had continued to take photographs until her early nineties.

Farley House and Gallery commented: 'We are delighted to exhibit About Women at the Lee Miller Gallery, a show that features a significant number of delightful images taken in Sussex in the 1960s and 1970s. This important exhibition includes both black and white, and colour photographs. Taken across the world over many decades with women as their subject, they capture moments in ordinary lives with profound humanity and an instinctive eye for composition. When asked, Dorothy stated: “I think of women as the most natural subjects for me.” The exhibition title is taken from her book About Women, which was first published 2015 and is still in print. Dorothy’s images of women are always intensely empathetic and, at times, reveal an astute, implicitly critical, awareness of the male gaze.'

Dorothy Bohm - About Women
Farleys House & Gallery, Chiddingly, East Sussex, BN8 6HW.
Open: Thursday, Friday, Sunday & selected Saturdays, April-October 1000- 1630
See: https://www.farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk/

Image: Dorothy Bohm, Goodwood. © Estate of Dorothy Bohm.