Dorothy Bohm: Breaks in Communication

For Dorothy Bohm, a Lithuanian refugee who had lost touch with most of her family when she arrived as a teenager in England in 1939, a sense of loss is acute and ever-present. It is this which ensures that her compelling images convey another layer of meaning: they are documents — both witty and melancholic — of a transient world.

It was surely not coincidental that immediately after Dorothy Bohm switched to color photography, torn advertising posters, graffiti, and vernacular murals began to emerge as a persistent theme in her work. At first, it probably appealed to her as material in whose unpredictable but often seductive range of colors she recognized the potential for selection and re-visualization; but while the undoubted allure on this level must have resonated with her painterly instincts, she soon appreciated its deeper significance.

Breaks in Communication presents a selection of these images.