[1] Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in June 1924 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), to a German-speaking family of Jewish-Lithuanian origins.
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).
In the 1950s she also lived in New York and San Francisco,[5] in 1956 travelling to Mexico, where she photographed in colour for the first time.
[8] By the late 1950s, Bohm had abandoned studio portraiture in favour of street photography, but was still working predominantly in black and white; in 1980 she was persuaded by André Kertész to experiment with colour, which she did for two years using a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera.
"[9] A major 1969 exhibition in the Institute of Contemporary Arts titled Spectrum and consisting of a main exhibition called Woman and four smaller exhibitions[10] showing photography by Bohm, Don McCullin, Tony Ray-Jones and Enzo Ragazzini,[11] drew a public response that encouraged one of its organizers, Sue Davies, to embark on founding the UK's first photography gallery, The Photographers' Gallery, which opened in 1971.
[12] Bohm's show was titled People at Peace and she said: "I photograph the humble, the anonymous - those who are spontaneous and mirror all of us.