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.”
On her first visit to Mexico in 1956 Bohm met the “father of Mexican photography”, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and they became friends. While he chose not to work in colour, on the grounds that “Mexico has more than enough colour of its own”, his country had the opposite effect on Bohm, who was moved to temporarily abandon black and white in order to record that colour on film.
It took until the 1980s, (on a visit to the far east), though, for Bohm to develop an ongoing engagement with colour. It was a move encouraged by the Hungarian-American photographer André Kertész, a principal early influence on her who became a friend from the time they met in New York.
In 1969 Bohm’s work attracted notable public and critical acclaim when it was exhibited alongside that of Don McCullin, Tony Ray-Jones and Enzo Ragazzini at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Her images were included in more than 30 exhibitions over the subsequent decades, in Paris, Jerusalem, Milan and Berlin, and at British galleries including the Royal Photographic Society gallery, the Victoria and Albert museum, and the Jewish and Hampstead museums in London. Bohm was closely involved in the Photographers’ Gallery from its inception in 1971, and an associate director for 15 years from 1971; it was there, in the 1984 retrospective A World Observed, that her colour images attracted record attendance.
Although Bohm came to consider herself a Londoner, and lived most of her adult life at the same address in Church Row, Hampstead, she was among the significant generation of photographers who arrived in Britain as refugees from nazism. The daughter of Ethel (nee Meirovich) and Tobias Israelit, she was born in Königsberg in eastern Prussia (since 1946 Kaliningrad, Russia). Dorothea (as she was named) was 15 when in 1939 her father, a major industrialist, sent his daughter and her older brother, Igor, to boarding schools in Sussex (he at Brighton college, she at Ditchling). His parting gift to Dorothea was a Leica camera.
As a German speaker, she was obliged to start school in a class with six-year-olds, but quickly acquired fluency in English and matriculated with top grades. When Igor won a place at Manchester University, Dorothy (as she had become) joined him there, hoping to train as a medical practitioner. The cost proved prohibitive, so she decided on taking a professional training.
In 1942 she obtained a photography diploma from the Manchester Municipal College of Technology, and started work for Samuel Cooper at his portrait studio, where fashion plates and family groups vied with portraits of the city fathers. She was also recruited by the War Office to assist in the anti-Nazi propaganda effort, and made a convincing public speaker.
By 1946 she was in a position to establish her own business, Studio Alexander. In the same year she married a fellow Prussian immigrant Louis Bohm, a university friend of her brother. For four years the income from Studio Alexander supported Louis through his chemistry PhD, before he established himself in the textiles business.
Louis’s rapid success allowed Dorothy to sell the studio in 1958 and transition to independent photography. As well as “taking her camera on a walk” wherever she went, she would accompany her husband on his business trips as a director of the manufacturing company Viyella, documenting trips to Europe and Mexico, the US, Russia and Israel, with her Leica camera.
In 1956 the couple settled in Hampstead, north London, and had two daughters. They also bought a working farm in West Sussex, where the family holidayed and Bohm took some of her most atmospheric rural scenes, with farming practices redolent more of the prewar than postwar period. Bohm had first begun to take landscapes at an earlier holiday home in Ticino, Switzerland, always seeking out the quality of light and eye-catching detail.
Until 1964, Bohm had no information as to her parents’ fate. Then she learned that, following the annexation of her homeland by the USSR, they had been deported to different camps in the Siberian gulag. Eventually, via a direct appeal to the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who delivered her letter at a meeting with the Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev, she was able to obtain their release and was reunited with them at their new home in Riga, Latvia.
Although Bohm continued photographing into her 90s, and introduced spatial experiments in making colour photos of objects – including flower arrangements – in her flat, she gradually focused more on recalibrating her archive rather than on making new work. Over 20 large-format photo books in both black-and-white and colour and, most recently, a set of five miniature books of her black-and-white country and city images, were the result.
Dorothy always claimed that, particularly in photographing children and women, it was an asset to be a woman, “because they can get away with things that men can’t. If you’re interested in the human aspect of photography, as I am, then you have to photograph people, and as a woman you are less intrusive.”
Louis died in 1994. Dorothy is survived by their daughters, Monica and Yvonne, four grandchildren, Sarah, Harriet, Benjamin and Hannah, and two great-grandchildren, Bobbie and Louis.
• Dorothy Bohm, photographer, born 22 June 1924; died 16 March 2023
