Shielding Yourself
‘What photography does is to make you bold beyond your normal powers, it’s a way of shielding yourself.’ Ian Jeffrey makes this statement about Dorothy Bohm in Richard Shaw’s documentary Seeing Daylight. The film is a moving account of the great photographer’s life, a remarkable testimony to a way of seeing that is at once acute, illusionless and compassionate. Jeffrey again: ‘For a short period during the 40s and 50s tenderness dominated photography’. Dorothy, he remarks, ‘lived in that particular world’. She somehow managed to keep it alive. Her photography is marked by philanthropy. She grew up amid trauma. She was conscious of the advances achieved during her lifetime. Yet, as a Financial Times tribute observed: ‘Bohm’s greatest wish, in a world where billions of images are carelessly created every single day, is more poetic than political: slow down and take the time to really see the world around you, she says. Look through your eyes, rather than your phone.’
