Dorothy Bohm, a Roving and Enduring Photographer, Dies at 98

Dorothy was attending a boarding school in Ditchling, a village in East Sussex, in the south of England, when a relative there suggested that she try photography. After interviewing with the London studio photographer Germaine Kanova, she was hired to be her assistant.

But with London being bombed in the Blitz, beginning in September 1940, Ms. Kanova was forced to close her studio, and Dorothy moved north to Manchester. In 1942, in the midst of war, she graduated from a photography program at the Manchester College of Technology (now the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology).

While in Manchester she met Louis Bohm, a Polish Jewish refugee whose mother and sister had died in the Warsaw Ghetto. They married in 1945, and Mrs. Bohm insisted that he complete his studies for a chemistry Ph.D. while she worked. She opened a portrait studio in Manchester, called Studio Alexander, in 1946.

By the late 1940s, Dr. Bohm was working for a petrochemical company and traveling frequently. Mrs. Bohm, carrying her Rolleiflex camera, accompanied him on trips to Israel, Mexico, Russia, Egypt, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland, at first producing black-and-white, usually plein-air, photographs.