How many visitors to Kettle’s Yard have photographed this exact table, the first of many careful constellations of objects in the house that was the home of Jim and Helen Ede between 1957 and 1973?
This beautiful image was captured by the celebrated artist Dorothy Bohm, who came to Britain in 1939 from Lithuania and forged a career in photography, first working in a studio setting and later as a documentary photographer.
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.
During visits to New York in the 1970s, Bohm had got to know the Hungarian photographer André Kertész (1894-1985), who introduced her to the polaroid camera. It was with Kertész – and her Polaroid camera – that Bohm visited Kettle’s Yard in the early 1980s where this photograph was taken. About her work, Bohm wrote:
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.
At Kettle’s Yard, Bohm found the stability that Jim Ede had sought to create during his time in Cambridge through his collection of artworks, ceramics, glass and natural objects – a ready-subject for Bohm’s camera in the early 1980s, as it has continued to prove for our visitors today.
In his book on Kettle’s Yard, A Way of Life, published in 1984 (shortly after Bohm’s visit) Jim Ede emphasised the special power of photography to bring a new perspective. In response to one photograph in the book he wrote:
I may have placed these things and made this bunch, tense with a celestial light, but it is the photographer who has reached and revealed this ‘sacrament of the present moment.’ This emphasises something which has become for me almost a rule; that each medium has its own unique way of life.
Dorothy Bohm’s work joins a small number of other photographs in the Kettle’s Yard collection, including by Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and will go on display at Kettle’s Yard in 2025.
Acquiring the Photograph
‘Still life – Pebbles’ was acquired at a recent modern art and design auction which included a number of photographs from Dorothy Bohm’s estate, following her death in 2023. The acquisition was possible due to the generosity of a group of supporters, many of whom are Patrons of Kettle’s Yard. Their support will also enable us to employ a specialist conservator, commission a new mount and frame, and undertake research to enrich our knowledge and appreciation of the photograph and its place within Bohm’s lifetime of making remarkable images. We are also grateful to Monica Bohm – Duchen, Dorothy Bohm’s daughter.
Monica writes of the acquisition:
I’m absolutely delighted that Kettle’s Yard has been able to acquire this poetic polaroid my mother, the late Dorothy Bohm, took in the very early 1980s when visiting the house with the great Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. It was his work in that medium that inspired her to experiment with polaroids herself, focussing particularly on still life compositions – which in her own words taught her how to ‘see in colour’ before she abandoned black and white photography forever in 1984.
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