“As long as I am alive, I will be a photographer. I will never retire”
– Dorothy Bohm
Petticoat Lane Market, London, 1960s by Dorothy Bohm
Dorothy Bohm (22 June 1924 – 15 March 2023) was born Dorothea Israelit in June 1924 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), to a Jewish German-speaking family. In 1939 she was sent to England in 1939 to escape Nazism: first to a boarding school in Ditchling, Sussex, but soon to Manchester, where her brother was a student, and where she met Louis Bohm (whom she would marry in 1945).
As they were saying goodbye, Dorothy recalled, her gadget-mad father, Tobias, took off the Leica camera he was wearing around his neck and gave it to her, telling her: “It might be useful to you”.
She told the JC: “I arrived on the eve of my 15th birthday. A traumatic experience because I had watched what Nazis were doing and the whole family was under great threat. After all these years it is still traumatic for me to remember those days”.
Petticoat Lane Market, London, 1960s
Butcher at Smithfield Market, London, 1970s St. Paul’s, Covent Garden Market, London, 1970s
Butcher at Smithfield Market, London, 1970s
Covent Garden Market, London, 1970s
Billingsgate Market, 1960s
Chapel Market, Islington, London, 1960s
Camden Town Market, 1960s
Charing Cross Road Market, London, 1972
Butchers at Smithfield Market, London, 1970s
Petticoat Lane Market, London, 1960s
St Paul’s, Covent Garden Market, London, 1960s
1970s London market
Dorothy Bohm: London Street Markets is at the Centre for British Photography until 17 December 2023. All photographs by Dorothy Bohm