News, views and stuff

Sometimes I make the effort to go to London for art exhibitions, and then find I’ve missed a gem in my own backyard.

The Sainsbury Centre (Norwich) currently has an exhibition of Dorothy Bohm’s photos (A World Observed) which is one of those gems, and fortunately I went today to see it, a week before it ends.

Dorothy Bohm is in her eighties now. She started off as a studio photographer, then started taking photos on her many travels. She experimented with colour polaroids in the 1980s, and from then on decided to stick with colour. I suppose the great thing today is that it no longer has to be either/or; we can shoot in colour and convert to black & white, or vice versa.

There is an exhibition of John Hedgecoe’s portraits of artists running concurrently, but I prefer Dorothy Bohm’s photos because of their lack of self-consciousness (both photographer and subject) and because they feature ‘ordinary’ people.

I liked the way the photos were grouped according to style rather than chronologically, and this has inspired me to add a page to my website called ‘Out and About’ – a selection of colour photos taken in different places, some with a digital camera, some scanned from film prints. Something to sort out over the next few weeks.

If anyone would like to respond in any way please feel free to send me an email via the contact box on my website. To get to my website from the blog, click on ‘News, Views and Stuff’ at the top of this page.