Dorothy Bohm
Born 1924 – Died 2023
She was born Dorothea Israelit in June 1924 to a Jewish family in East Prussia, but as a teenager in 1939 was sent to England to escape persecution by the Nazi regime. She attended a small boarding school in Ditchling in Sussex for a year, before moving to join her brother in Manchester. There she studied photography at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology from 1940 to 1942, and in 1945 she married a fellow refugee, Polish-born Louis Bohm.
Dorothy Bohm opened her portrait studio ‘Studio Alexander’ in Market Street in Manchester in 1946. During the 1950s, she and Louis also travelled extensively, to Switzerland, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Texas, Louisiana and Mexico. With her camera, Bohm captured the changing life of these cities in the post-war years – developing a reputation for creating images that conveyed a deep feeling of humanity alongside a keen sense of formal composition.
In 1956 they settled in Hampstead where they raised their two children. Dorothy sold the Manchester studio in 1958 and continued to work in the mode of documentary or ‘street’ photography. Her work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1969, and in 1981 a retrospective exhibition was staged at Camden Arts Centre.
