For over 70 years, camera shutter clicks have been the soundtrack to Dorothy Baum’s life.
As a teenager in Lithuania, she was given a Leica by her father while on a train to escape the Nazis. She studied photography in Manchester, England after she was kicked out of London in a blitzkrieg. Her camera was her unfailing companion as she traveled the world, documenting her journey and the people she saw with an empathetic eye. As her fame as a photographer grew, she switched to color her films and experimented with her bold new style.
Mrs. Baum, who produced a prodigious number of photographs and became a mogul of the art form in the process, died on 15 March at the age of 98 in a nursing home in northwest London. Her daughter Monika Baum-Duggen confirmed her death.
Madame Baume started out as a portrait painter, but her photography blossomed when she left the studio. She began producing black-and-white landscape and street photographs documenting her life in cities such as London and Paris. Colorful abstract composition. and still life.
For Mrs. Baum, who has been uprooted many times, photography has a lasting appeal.
“Photography fulfills my deepest desire to stop things from disappearing,” she told The Times of Israel in 2016.
Her photographs have been published in over 10 books and over 20 exhibitions.
Street lamps cast filigree shadows on the sun’s rays slanting down a deserted alley.
A burly woman selling flowers appears to rise from a cluster of petals in front of a striped umbrella propped at her side.
Israeli and Palestinian children play in the sunny streets, laughing into the lens.
A woman and child look down on a small dog in a pitch-black courtyard as Mrs. Baume’s camera looks down on them.
Regardless of subject matter, much of her work was filled with warmth.
“Dorothy Baum knows her camera not only sees it, but also feels it,” says British artist and historian Roland Penrose in her first book, A World Observed. 1970) in the foreword.
Mrs. Baum wanted those feelings to be positive. As she said in 2016: “I’ve seen a lot. I’m trying to show my good side.”
Dorothea Israelite was born on June 22, 1924 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), to Tobias and Ethel (Meilovich) Israelites. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a successful textile industrialist.
After a privileged childhood, the Jewish Israeli family moved to Lithuania in 1932. In June 1939, with the rise of Nazi Germany and the persecution of Jews, her father sent Dorothy to boarding school in England for her safety.
When she said goodbye to her parents, her father handed her his Leica and said, “It might be useful for you,” she recalled in 2016.
Dorothy attended boarding school in Ditchling, a village in East Sussex in the south of England. That’s when her relatives there suggested she take a picture of her.After she interviewed a studio photographer in London Jermaine Canovashe was hired as an assistant.
But when London was bombed in the Blitzkrieg that began in September 1940, Kanova was forced to close his studio and Dorothy moved north to Manchester. In 1942, during the war, she graduated from the photography program at the Manchester Institute of Technology (now the Manchester University of Science and Technology).
While in Manchester, she met Louis Baum, a Polish-Jewish refugee whose mother and sister died in the Warsaw ghetto. They married in her 1945, and Mrs Baume insisted that she complete her studies for a doctorate in chemistry. while she was working. She opened her portrait studio in Manchester in 1946 called Studio Her Alexander.
By the late 1940s, Dr. Bohm was working for a petrochemical company and traveling frequently. Rolleiflex Mrs Baum with her camera accompanied her on trips to Israel, Mexico, Russia, Egypt, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland.
The couple lived in Paris, New York City, and San Francisco before settling in London’s Hampstead neighborhood, where Mrs Baum lived until her death.
In the late 1950s, Mrs Baum was told by the Red Cross that her parents and sister Dina, although they had survived the war, were in Siberian labor camps as enemies of the Kremlin’s capitalists because they were living in Soviet-controlled territory at the time. I learned that I was deported. She spent many years there until she was released. They were living in Riga, then part of the Soviet Union and now the capital of Latvia, when Mrs. Bohm visited them for her reunion in 1960.
Three years later, Mrs Baum’s parents got permission to go to England. Her sister Dina she emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s.
Mrs. Baum’s first photographic exhibition was held in 1969 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London.
Inspired by the Polaroid photographs taken by Mr. Kertesz, Mrs. Baume used Polaroids in the early 1980s and switched exclusively to color film in 1984. Her color work included abstract images of torn posters, store displays reflected in puddles, and mannequins leaning against storefronts. All her Hong Kong and Japanese photos were taken in color.
Dr. Bohm passed away in 1994. In addition to his daughter Monica, she has another daughter Yvonne Nicolas. four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mrs. Bohm’s other publications include A World Observed 1940-2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm (2010) and About Women: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm (2015). She was the subject of two of her documentaries for the BBC, ‘Dorothy Baum—The Photographer’ (1980) and ‘Seeing the Sunlight: Photographs of Dorothy Baum’ (2018).
By 2018, Mrs Baum stopped taking pictures, but as she told The Guardian, the visual world still brought her joy.
“My bedroom has an amazing view, more beautiful than any country in the Mediterranean,” she said.
