Farleys House and Gallery announced that Dorothy Bohm: About Women draws its title from the photographer’s 2015 photobook and assembles images spanning the 1940s through to the 2010s. The display includes both black-and-white and colour works, among them a significant group taken in Sussex during the 1960s and 1970s when Bohm maintained a farm near Billingshurst. Farleys House and Gallery stated that the photographs capture moments in ordinary lives with profound humanity and an instinctive eye for composition. The gallery further noted that Bohm once declared, “I think of women as the most natural subjects for me.” Officials added that her images of women are always intensely empathetic and at times reveal an astute implicitly critical awareness of the male gaze.
The Art Newspaper reported that the exhibition arrives as interest in Lee Miller remains elevated after her Tate Britain survey and a 2023 biopic. Bohm who died in 2023 at age 98 played a part in reviving attention to Miller’s work after her son Antony Penrose rediscovered a cache of negatives. According to the publication Bohm encouraged their move from private storage into public view.
Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in 1924 in Königsberg, East Prussia, and was sent to England in 1939 to escape Nazism, her official biography on dorothybohm.com records. She studied photography at Manchester College of Technology, opened a portrait studio in that city in 1946 and later shifted to street photography after settling in London. The Photographers’ Gallery in London which Bohm helped found in 1971 counts her among its early associate directors for 15 years, biographical accounts show.
Roland Penrose, Miller’s husband, wrote the foreword to Bohm’s first monograph A World Observed published in 1970. In it he observed that her camera does not only see it also feels, The Art Newspaper noted. Monica Bohm-Duchen, the photographer’s daughter and curator of the current exhibition, said her mother viewed gender as an asset in her practice. Bohm-Duchen stated, “She always said that being a woman was actually an advantage, not a disadvantage.”
Farleys House and Gallery reported that the exhibition runs until July 26 and coincides with two displays devoted to Lee Miller, one on her street photography and another titled Lee’s Surreal Menagerie. Bohm’s work is held in collections including those of Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum, according to institutional records. The gallery is located in Chiddingly, East Sussex, and opens Thursdays, Fridays, Sundays and selected Saturdays between 10am and 4.30pm from April to October.
