36 pages
printed in England
staple bound
14cm x 20cm

London Street Markets 1960s-1970s

The comfortable central European world in which Dorothy Bohm (née Israelit) grew up was a very different one to that of the London street markets she was to be so fascinated by over three decades later. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1924, her Jewish family left Germany and moved to Memel in Lithuania in 1932; in June 1939, just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, her parents made the wise but difficult decision to send her to the safety of England. By Dorothy’s own admission, and fully understandable given her early experience of profound displacement, photography’s unique ability to stop time in its tracks and preserve a moment for ever lies at the very heart of its appeal for her.

A year in a Sussex boarding school was followed by a photography course at Manchester College of Technology, and in 1946 she set up her own portrait studio in that city. Soon after, during a trip to Switzerland, she discovered the delights of working outside the studio, although she retained the business until the late 1950s. Her training as a portraitist would stand her in good stead when from the late 1940s onwards she and her husband Louis travelled extensively, both in Europe and in Israel, the USA and Mexico, where she focussed on capturing the poetry and sometimes the pathos of ordinary working lives.

It was only in the 1960s and 70s, after she settled in the capital and started a family that Dorothy turned her lens on the city that has been her home ever since. While its vibrant street markets weren’t of course the only aspect of the city that interested her, she returned to them again and again, setting out in the morning with a particular destination in mind, armed only with her Rolleiflex camera and the advantage (as she has always seen it) of being female – hence, no doubt, the amused, slightly flirtatious expressions of some of her male subjects. The markets ranged widely, from Smithfield, Billingsgate and Petticoat Lane to Portobello Road, Farringdon Road book market, Camden Town and Hampstead. But it was the old Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market with which she engaged most intimately, due partly to the fact that it was a mere stone’s throw from the pioneering Photographers’ Gallery she helped found in 1971.

A few of the photographs reproduced here are already well-known – most notably the two striking images of solitary women stallholders at the very centre of the book – but many have never been published before. Familiar or otherwise, collectively they present a vivid picture of a bygone world, sometimes entertaining and extrovert, as often melancholy and introspective, but always humane, empathetic and engaging — a world of horse carts and cloth caps, hard work and meagre monetary rewards but also of unexpected grace, good-humoured camaraderie and other rewards less possible to quantify.

Monica Bohm-Duchen