A selling exhibition of over forty colour prints selected by the photographer, many of them never seen in public before
9 May – 14 June 2019
Vernissage 8 May 6 – 9 pm
RSVP to avivson@gmail.com
Avivson Gallery Highgate
The Avivson Gallery is pleased to announce its next exhibition, a selection of small and exquisite colour prints, many of them images never seen in public before, by doyenne of British photography Dorothy Bohm.
Intimate in scale and mainly domestic in subject-matter (still lifes predominate), these are lyrical, poetic images that delight the eye. Unlike most of Dorothy’s photographs, they are largely unpeopled, yet even in inanimate objects, a warm human presence is implicit.
Some thirty C-type prints, dating mostly from the 1990s, will be included, alongside a smaller selection of jewel-like polaroid images, which marked Dorothy’s transition from monochrome to colour in the early 1980s.
The exhibition has been selected by Dorothy herself, in collaboration with her daughter, art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen, initiator of the Insiders/Outsiders Festival, a year-long nationwide arts festival paying tribute to the rich contribution to British culture made by those who, like her mother, found refuge here from Nazi Europe. (See https://insidersoutsidersfestival.org/ for further details.)
Dorothy Bohm (née Israelit) was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1924, and was sent to the safety of England in 1939, where she has lived ever since. After studying photography at Manchester College of Technology, she opened her own portrait studio in Manchester in 1946. In the late 1940s, a trip to Ascona in Switzerland prompted her to start working outside the studio. By the 1970s she had established herself a leading, profoundly humanist ‘street photographer’. In the early 1980s, however, she felt she had said all she wanted to say in black and white and – inspired by her friend André Kertész’s work in the medium – began to experiment with SX70 polaroid images which she has said taught her how to see in colour. By 1984, she was working exclusively in colour, and now claims that she can no longer see the world in black and white….
Dorothy is available for interview on request.
49 Highgate High Street London N6 5JX. tel. 07852 558944
avivson@gmail.com www.avivsongallery.com
open: Wednesday Friday Saturday 12-6 and Thursday 12-8
