Dorothy Bohm

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USING a camera as an extension of her artist’s eye, Dorothy Bohm’s body of work had at its heart a humanist approach – a marriage of what it intrinsically means to live, and a recognition of the beauty that this life offers.

The Hampstead-based photographer, who has died aged 98, worked for more than eight decades and lived through the tumultuous dislocation caused by war and exile. Dorothy was born in East Prussia in 1924. In 1932, her father Tobias, a successful Jewish businessman working in the textile industry, saw the Nazi threat.

Tobias and Dorothy’s mother Ethel moved the family to Lithuania and up to the age of 14 Dorothy lived in Memel, which had a large German Jewish community. Dorothy’s happy childhood ended when the Germans invaded.

Her father was on a blacklist and Dorothy recalled intimidating Nazi parades.  As war closed in, her brother travelled to England and Dorothy left her parents and sister Dinah to join him.

As she boarded a train, her father took a Leica camera from around his neck and gave it to Dorothy.

“He said ‘this may be useful to you,’” she recalled.

Her parents were both saved – and then persecuted – by the USSR. The Red Army invaded and shipped the family to Siberia. In 1960, Dorothy managed to track them down – for many years it was not clear if they had survived but with the help of the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, the USSR was persuaded to give them visas in 1963.

Dorothy’s experiences forged a determination and resilience, and a teenage visit to a studio run by female photographer Germaine Kanova in Baker Street gave her an insight into a new world. She had previously harboured designs on becoming a doctor. She enrolled at Manchester University, aged 16, to study photography.

Completing a four-year degree in two, it was here she met Polish Jewish emigre Louis Bohm.

He had left his parents and a sister, Dorothy’s age, behind as well. Louis’s mother and sister disappeared, assumed to have been murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto. Louis and Dorothy married in 1945 and after graduating, she took the bold decision to start a portrait business, a pioneering move for a 21-year-old emigre. Her inspirations were wide.

In a 1980 BBC film, she discussed how a photograph could stop time in its tracks, it could capture a moment and make it immortal. Avoiding photographing the famous, she looked for the special human qualities in everyone, and wanted to instil dignity to those she shot.

This was married to a love of visual beauty, and while she shot images in black and white, she loved colour in all its forms and saw art as an antidote to the inhumanity the world has witnessed in her formative years. T

aking her talent from the studio to the street, from the late 1940s, the couple travelled extensively. They lived in Paris in 1954 and New York and San Francisco in 1957, giving her scope for new studies.

Returning to London, the Bohms moved to Hampstead – they would stay there for the rest of their lives, settling in Church Row.

They had two children – Monica, born in 1957, and Yvonne in 1960.

In 1963, the family bought a working farm in West Sussex and Dorothy used it for a study that lasted over 23 years.

In 1971, Dorothy helped found the West End-based Photographers’ Gallery and was an associate director for 15 years. Dorothy loved the culture of Hampstead, visiting Louis Patisserie and the Coffee Cup, walking over the Heath.

Holidays were spent in Sussex and Italy. Home life was full of music and friendship, though she avoided cooking, – her lack of culinary skills a well-worn joke among family.

This year, a retrospective of Dorothy’s work is touring Eastern Europe – and has been on display where she lived as a child. To mark her centenary in 2023, exhibitions are planned in London, Jerusalem, and Rome.

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