Yesterday I met Dorothy Bohm, who helped found the Photographer’s Gallery with Sue Davies in 1969.
Over lunch near her home in Hampstead, Dorothy told me all about her Lithuanian Jewish background, how she came to Manchester in June 1939 to escape the Nazis, aged just 14. As she departed Germany, her father put his Leica around her neck and said “this might come in useful.”
She studied Photographic Technology at Manchester, set up her own studio and then moved to London in the fifties, where she got to know all the photo greats. She lived in Paris for a time, and she showed me a print Kertész gave her in New York.
I spent the day looking through her pictures and felt very inspired. She has an amazing talent for seeing through a picture, as she says “to give you something to think about, a photographie humaniste.” Afterwards, cycling from Hampstead to Greenwich, I wanted to take my own ‘Bohm’ (see below).
In the evening I went to see Wim Wender’s brilliant Pina, which gave me so many ideas for photos that I had to scribble them into my notebook in the dark.
Image © Dorothy Bohm 2009
Image © Julian Lass 2011
Posted 9 months ago with NotesTags: My writing my photos influences
