In the mid-1980s Dorothy abandoned black and white photography for colour, infusing her images with texture and spatial ambiguity to convey humanity in increasingly abstract and allusive forms. Dorothy Bohm died in March 2023 at the age of nearly 99, continuing to take photographs until her early nineties and closely engaged with the medium she loved so much until the very end.
We are delighted to exhibit About Women at Farleys, a show that features a significant number of delightful images taken in Sussex in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Bohm family owned a working farm near Billingshurst. This important exhibition includes both black and white, and colour photographs, with women as their subject, which were taken across the world over many decades. When asked, Dorothy stated; “I think of women as the most natural subjects for me.” The exhibition title is taken from her book About Women, which was published by Dewi Lewis in 2015 and is still in print. Dorothy’s images of women are always intensely empathetic and – especially in her colour work – reveal an astute, implicitly critical, awareness of the male gaze.
