‘The sharp perception only a woman can bring to observing other women’: Dorothy Bohm’s images go on present at Lee Miller’s former residence – The Artwork Newspaper

With curiosity in Lee Miller at a excessive following her latest Tate Britain survey and the 2023 biopic starring Kate Winslet, extra unsung girl photographers could quickly obtain their due. Dorothy Bohm (1924-2023) actually appears poised to do exactly that, with a brand new exhibition of her images at Farleys House & Gallery, Miller’s former residence in East Sussex.

The exhibition, which opens on 2 April, is titled About Women, after Bohm’s 2015 photobook and can function seven many years of Bohm’s female-focused work. “She always said that being a woman was actually an advantage, not a disadvantage,” says the artist’s daughter, Monica Bohm-Duchen, an artwork historian working to steward her mom’s legacy because the photographer’s dying in 2023, aged 98.

Born in 1924 to a Jewish household in East Prussia, Bohm was despatched to England when she was 14 years outdated, simply previous to the outbreak of the Second World War. She went to high school within the East Sussex village of Ditchling, comparatively close to to Farleys House, and later moved to Manchester to check images and open her personal studio.

In 1947, Bohm started pursuing the road images for which she is finest recognized, impressed by a go to to an artist colony in Ascona, Switzerland, the place one other exhibition of her work will open later this yr (Dorothy Bohm: A Life Devoted to Photography, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona, 20 September-10 January 2027).

Bohm would go on to turn out to be a outstanding determine within the London images scene, working mainly in black and white earlier than switching to color within the Nineteen Eighties. Despite restricted title recognition, curiosity is rising within the photographer with each the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge buying work over the previous two years.

When contemplating who to strategy to exhibit her mom’s images, Farleys House was a “natural place”, Bohm-Duchen says. The connection goes again to 1969, when Bohm held her first solo exhibition on the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which was co-founded by Miller’s husband, the painter Roland Penrose. Penrose wrote the foreword to Bohm’s first photobook, A World Observed (1970), after which their households “kept in touch”, Bohm-Duchen says.

Perhaps an important connection is the function Bohm performed in establishing Miller’s legacy after Miller’s son Antony Penrose rediscovered her cache of negatives. She urged him to get the physique of labor “out from the cupboards and under the bed, all the places where [Miller] put it—having lost interest in photography towards the end of her life—and to get it back in the public eye,” Bohm-Duchen says. Bohm additionally performed an vital function in posthumously exhibiting Miller’s work at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, the place she was affiliate director within the Seventies and early 80s.

Now Penrose is returning the favour, noting that “Dorothy Bohm’s photographs bring us her compassion, her gentle humour and the sharp perception only a woman can bring to observing other women.”

• Dorothy Bohm: About Women, Farleys House & Gallery, Chiddingly, East Sussex, 2 April-26 July