FILM SCREENING: ‘Seeing Daylight: The Photography of Dorothy Bohm’

Widely considered one of the doyennes of late twentieth century British photography, Dorothy Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in Germany in 1924. Sent to the safety of England in 1939, she attended school in Sussex and studied photography in Manchester before setting up her own portrait studio there. In the late 1940s, inspired by a visit to the artists’ colony of Ascona in the Ticino, Switzerland, she started working outside the studio, capturing moments in ordinary lives with profound humanity and an instinctive eye for composition. Her first exhibition was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, in 1969, where she met Roland Penrose. This led to his writing the Foreword to her first book, A World Observed, in 1970 – in which he memorably commented that ‘her camera does not only see, it also feels’.