Dorothy Bohm’s “About Women” Brings Seven Decades of Photography to Farleys House
What does it mean for a photographer to be rediscovered in the very house where she helped restore another artist’s reputation? This spring, Farleys House & Gallery in Chiddingly, East Sussex — the former home of Lee Miller — opens “Dorothy Bohm: About Women,” a wide-ranging exhibition that traces seven decades of Dorothy Bohm’s (German-born British, 1924–2023) camera-led attention to women’s lives.
Opening April 2 and on view through July 26, the exhibition takes its title from Bohm’s 2015 photobook “About Women” and gathers female-focused work spanning the arc of her long career. “She always said that being a woman was actually an advantage, not a disadvantage,” says Bohm’s daughter, Monica Bohm-Duchen, an art historian who has been stewarding her mother’s legacy since the photographer’s death in 2023 at age 98.
Bohm’s biography is marked by displacement and reinvention. Born in 1924 to a Jewish family in East Prussia, she was sent to England at 14, just before the Second World War. She attended school in Ditchling, an East Sussex village not far from Farleys House, before moving north to Manchester to study photography and establish her own studio.
In 1947, she began the street photography that would become central to her reputation, a shift she traced to a formative visit to an artist colony in Ascona, Switzerland. That connection will be revisited later this year when a second major presentation opens: “Dorothy Bohm: A Life Devoted to Photography” at Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Ascona, running September 20 through January 10, 2027.
Although Bohm became a respected presence in London’s photography circles, her name has often remained less familiar than her images. She worked primarily in black and white for decades, then moved into color in the 1980s, bringing a different temperature to her observations of public life. In the past two years, institutional attention has sharpened: both the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge have acquired her photographs.
For Bohm-Duchen, Farleys House was an obvious venue to deepen that momentum. The relationship between the families stretches back to 1969, when Bohm had her first solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, an institution co-founded by Miller’s husband, the painter Roland Penrose. Penrose later wrote the foreword to Bohm’s first photobook, “A World Observed” (1970), and the connection endured.
Yet the most consequential link between Bohm and Farleys House may be her role in bringing Miller’s work back into view. After Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, rediscovered a cache of his mother’s negatives, Bohm encouraged him to move the photographs from private storage into public life. Bohm-Duchen recalls her mother urging him to get the work “out from the cupboards and under the bed, all the places where [Miller] put it — having lost interest in photography towards the end of her life — and to get it back in the public eye.”
Bohm also helped shape Miller’s posthumous exhibition history through her work at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, where she served as associate director in the 1970s and early 1980s. Now, in a fitting reversal, Antony Penrose has framed Bohm’s return to Farleys as a kind of reciprocity, praising the photographs for their “compassion,” “gentle humour,” and “sharp perception only a woman can bring to observing other women.”
At a moment when museums and audiences are reexamining the histories that left many women photographers under-credited, “About Women” offers something more durable than a corrective gesture: a sustained, humane way of looking — and a reminder that legacies are often built not only through images, but through the quiet advocacy of peers.
“Dorothy Bohm: About Women” is on view at Farleys House & Gallery, Chiddingly, East Sussex, April 2–July 26.
