The pioneering photographer Dorothy Bohm, who has died aged 98, began her professional life working as a studio portraitist in Manchester before abandoning formal poses and artificial lighting in favour of “photographing what I saw”, as she put it. From local backstreets and marketplaces to rural landscapes at home and abroad, her subjects expanded to include extensive documentation of the cities where she lived (London, Paris and, briefly, New York) and the other countries she visited and revisited (Mexico, Italy and Israel).
Bohm regarded herself less as a “street” photographer than as belonging to a school of humanitarian photography, as part of a generation of photographers who chose to use their medium to show the human condition in all its guises. She described how “the photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transience less painful … I have tried to create order out of chaos, to find stability in flux and beauty in the most unlikely places.”
