Little Happenings: Photographs of Children by Dorothy Bohm

Seville Fair, Spain, 1958, by Dorothy Bohm © Dorothy Bohm Archive

V&A Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London

This special display of photographs of children by leading London-based photographer Dorothy Bohm includes a significant number of never-before-seen works revealed to the public for the first time. Spanning 12 countries over seven decades, the display shows how the idea of childhood and early social interactions have been a source of inspiration for Bohm during her extensive travels throughout her long career. Early works as well as later colour images are presented in a series of themes exploring family and sibling relationships, friendship, play and creativity, dressing up and imagination, to illustrate the universality of childhood.

Dorothy Bohm was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia to a Jewish family in 1924, and moved to Lithuania in 1932. In 1939, at the age of fourteen, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Bohm was sent to boarding school in Sussex, England, to escape the threat of Nazism. On boarding the train, her father gave her his Leica camera as a parting gift. She has since had her work exhibited in over 25 venues across the UK and internationally and has published fifteen books of her photographs.

See also: Seeing Daylight a 2017 documentary, directed by Richard Shaw, about Dorothy Bohm’s practice, how she learned photography, what drives her to photograph and how her images changed photography.

Screening on 13 March includes a private viewing of the exhibition Little Happenings: photographs of Children by Dorothy Bohm, which closes on 17 March, and a Q&A with Dorothy’s daughter Monica Bohm-Duchen.