Dorothy Bohm is one of Britain’s finest street photographers, arriving in the UK in 1939 after fleeing Nazi persecution in Lithuania. At 92 she continues to take pictures, capturing moments in life with humanity and compassion. With contributions from friends and family, and reflections from Dorothy herself, this insightful documentary reflects her most important images and revisits the places that have shaped her unique view of the world.
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Unity House Productions LTD – Ref. 7252
Subscribe to Journeyman here: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=journeymanpictures
For more information, visit https://www.journeyman.tv/film/7252
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/journeymanpictures
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/JourneymanNews
https://twitter.com/JourneymanVOD
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Visit our subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/JourneymanPictures/
Unity House Productions LTD – Ref. 7252
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 [ Music ]
00:15 And here we are, Photography Magazine, 1955,
00:20 the first article I had published.
00:24 I could go on giving instances where the light,
00:29 the mood, or an idea made me catch my breath
00:33 and hasten to take a picture.
00:36 But I think you will know already how much I enjoy
00:39 myself with my camera out of doors,
00:42 and how glad I am to have seen daylight.
00:48 [ Music ]
01:18 [ Music ]
01:48 [ Music ]
02:07 [ Background Sounds ]
02:13 [ Papers Rustling ]
02:17 That's in Brussels, in '49, I guess.
02:24 Well, it's been an awfully long life,
02:31 and a life in which photography started to play
02:36 a very important part when I was 16.
02:42 Now I've spent 73 years almost taking photographs.
02:47 She's been committed her whole life to being a photographer,
02:54 and also really promoting the sort of,
02:58 the public understanding of photography.
03:01 People's legacies probably, when you think about it,
03:04 is well, what did they do that was different?
03:06 You know, and what difference did they make?
03:10 Her enthusiasm for the medium, which is infectious,
03:13 you know, she really does think that, you know,
03:16 photography is important.
03:18 The great thing about Dorothy is that she had a story to tell
03:22 of loss and displacement.
03:24 The problem with a lot of photographers is that
03:26 they don't really have a story to tell,
03:28 but she had something to photograph about.
03:31 She's been an obsessive photographer ever since.
03:33 One of the first photographs by Dorothy I bought
03:37 for the V&A Collection is of people at Western Supermare.
03:42 They're walking across this boardwalk
03:44 with the sea all around them.
03:45 It's as if life is a precarious journey.
03:49 I read that symbolism into it.
03:51 It's not forced in any way.
03:53 It tied in completely to this astonishing life story.
03:58 You see, there's a picture of this here.
04:01 It was in Greece.
04:06 Right?
04:07 We passed by,
04:09 and I asked my husband to stop the car,
04:13 and he said, "I can't."
04:15 We came back two hours later, and they were still there,
04:20 and I asked permission to take a photograph.
04:23 It was rather lovely.
04:25 It's got, can you see, bandage there.
04:28 It's really humanity, isn't it?
04:33 It's a real human being.
04:35 Well, I was born into a Jewish family.
04:51 It was a fairly wealthy, well-to-do,
04:56 liberal, well-educated family.
05:00 My father was a wonderfully good-looking man,
05:04 very easy to love.
05:09 I simply adored him from the very beginning.
05:12 He had a Leica,
05:14 and he used to photograph my brother a lot,
05:18 and me.
05:20 I didn't like being photographed.
05:23 What can I tell you about Königsberg?
05:27 Spent happy days there.
05:29 There was a royal park belonging to the castle,
05:34 and that's where I learned to ride a bicycle.
05:37 I have pictures of my grandmother, don't we,
05:41 wearing those sort of hats.
05:43 I had a very happy childhood there.
05:47 I see so many things happened afterwards.
05:56 I remember in 1932,
05:59 it was the beginning of Nazism,
06:03 and of course, at nine, I didn't know what it was about at all.
06:07 There was a Nazi youth going through the streets.
06:11 My father decided that we should leave Königsberg.
06:23 My father's factory was doing extremely well.
06:27 I was always known as Tobias's daughter,
06:31 because he was a great personality in the town.
06:36 I remember once walking with my dad,
06:39 and two women workers passed,
06:41 and my father took off his hat to them,
06:43 and the girl said to the other girl,
06:46 "Who was that?"
06:47 "Don't you know, that was the boss."
06:50 For some reason, I remember the way he treated his staff.
06:55 In March 1939,
07:11 Hitler invaded.
07:13 My father had been told
07:15 that he would be warned before they come.
07:19 From the age of 13, I remember
07:22 hate propaganda from the Nazis to the Jews.
07:31 My father's name was mentioned very often,
07:36 that they would definitely get rid of him.
07:40 And a very sad thing I remember,
07:43 my father went back to the factory,
07:49 and his own two porters did not allow him to come in.
07:55 And he didn't know that I was in the room.
08:02 And I saw my wonderful father cry and sob.
08:09 Right.
08:10 I was at home, I got the telephone call
08:29 saying that, "You've got to get out."
08:32 We took the last train.
08:37 My mother didn't want to go without him.
08:40 He took us to the station,
08:42 but he jumped off the train and stayed.
08:45 And I leant out of the carriage.
08:49 My father took off his Leica and said,
08:53 "This might be useful to you."
08:55 Now, I had no interest in photography at all.
08:58 It's odd.
08:59 Then the train had to cross Germany,
09:05 and I was looking at an album I had.
09:08 It was my youth group,
09:10 the Star of David.
09:14 One of the people had the Hakenkreuz,
09:18 and he said, "What's that?"
09:20 And I told him.
09:22 Anyhow, he let me go.
09:25 But crossing was difficult.
09:30 [Music]
09:45 Certain things that happen, you know,
09:48 somehow memory does not want to retain.
09:53 It's odd that, you know,
09:55 because I've got on the whole very good memory.
09:59 Dorothy is an émigré,
10:02 a Lithuanian Jew, comes to Britain.
10:05 The world that she was born in
10:09 and was brought up in has gone.
10:12 Very many famous photographers of last century,
10:16 very Jewish and misplaced Jewish,
10:20 I believe that they took the certain disadvantage
10:25 as an advantage.
10:28 They are much more conscious
10:30 of what the world used to be like,
10:32 and the world is going to disappear,
10:34 and they have to record it.
10:36 And I could tell you hundreds of stories
10:39 of photographers who've been driven
10:42 by that very thing,
10:44 and I think it is something that is very much
10:46 what drives Dorothy.
10:48 [Music]
11:06 I was lucky that a first cousin of my father's
11:11 knew that I was leaving school,
11:14 that I had received my school certificate
11:17 and he said, "I know you wanted to study medicine,
11:20 but that's out of the question now.
11:23 We don't know where your family is now.
11:27 There's no money left."
11:29 He said, "I've watched you.
11:33 You're very observant.
11:35 What about photography?
11:37 Do you know your brother's starting at Manchester?
11:40 Let me find out.
11:42 I think it has a vocational course."
11:46 And they accepted me.
11:48 I was only 16.
11:50 If you've been displaced,
11:52 and displaced multiple times,
11:55 you can go one of two ways, can't you?
11:58 I mean, either you react by becoming a rover,
12:01 or you decide,
12:03 "This is where I hang my hat."
12:05 I think because the father was so strong in her mind,
12:09 and he'd always told her to, you know,
12:11 "Be brave, be strong, go forward, go back."
12:14 So Manchester very, very much became her home.
12:17 I met the man who became
12:22 the most important person in my life, Louis Bohme.
12:26 I was introduced to him by somebody
12:29 who knew both his father and my father.
12:32 This chap saw me walking and saw Louis in front,
12:36 and he said, "The two of you, you must meet."
12:41 And from that time on, he started looking after me.
12:44 I went to see a very good photographer
12:49 to try and sell my Leica.
12:52 And he asked me at the time, "Why are you selling it?"
12:56 I said, "I need some money before I find a job."
13:00 I started to talk photography,
13:02 and she said, "You seem to know a lot."
13:05 I said, "Yes, I've just graduated from the college."
13:09 She said, "I'm just opening a studio in Market Street
13:12 "in a very prominent position.
13:15 "I can offer you a job."
13:18 He told me that while I'm away for 2 weeks,
13:21 he will be what was then called "operator."
13:24 I did, and I loved it.
13:27 And I was obviously good, because when I came back,
13:30 everybody said how pleased they were with what I'd done.
13:36 But he paid me very, very little.
13:40 Louis realized that I was good at what I was doing,
13:44 and he said, "How about starting a studio of your own?"
13:48 And I said, "Oh, God, I wouldn't mind."
13:51 And he said, "Will you marry me?"
13:53 I said, "I'll only marry you
13:55 "if you agree to study for your PhD
13:58 "and I become the breadwinner."
14:00 And I'm still proud of it.
14:02 At 21, I was able to earn a living for the 2 of us.
14:07 I had to change my name from the Jewish Israelit,
14:17 and I chose Alexander because I have quite a lot in the family.
14:21 And here are some of the pictures.
14:24 They're rather pretty Lancashire girls, incidentally.
14:30 The ridiculous thing is that I remember
14:33 taking the photographs right through my life.
14:36 Ridiculous.
14:38 I told myself, "Everybody has something that is, well...
14:59 "beautiful, let's put it that way."
15:02 And somehow I managed to achieve it.
15:05 And this is the person who took the photograph, that was me.
15:09 I don't know.
15:15 18 years.
15:17 Yeah.
15:21 I was the same person photographing in the studio,
15:24 but I felt the world was much too exciting a place
15:28 to concentrate on that, right?
15:31 In 1947, somebody thought I might be interested
15:37 in opening a portrait studio in Switzerland,
15:41 and he paid for Louis and me to go.
15:44 Ascona...
15:46 was an eye-opener for me.
15:49 It was full of interesting people,
15:52 mainly German Jewish emigres, artists and writers.
15:56 And I started to photograph.
16:00 I used to go out towards evening, around the lake,
16:11 and I remember the chap who was doing the pursing for me
16:15 used to say, "Why didn't you wait for the sunshine?"
16:19 All I wanted was that kind of light, you see.
16:22 (music)
16:25 And I showed these pictures to the artists,
16:32 and they gave me great encouragement.
16:35 To be encouraged by the artists there
16:41 meant a great deal to me, right?
16:44 So I began to photograph outside the studio,
16:48 and I was never looking back.
16:51 This is the camera that I used
16:54 for most of the early pictures.
16:57 The early pictures were mainly on the continent,
17:05 and the continent recovering from Hitler.
17:09 It was just the beginning of a new life for these people.
17:20 My sympathy for these people was great,
17:23 and you couldn't photograph with a Rolleiflex
17:26 unless you had an understanding
17:29 with the person you were photographing.
17:32 I think Dorothy always had a compulsion to go on.
17:37 There was always something she had to say.
17:40 I once talked to Dorothy and Louis in this room,
17:43 and he described to me going across the Alps
17:46 and the sun coming up.
17:48 It was phenomenal.
17:50 It was this new hope of the 1940s post-war.
17:54 For a short period in the '40s and '50s,
17:58 tenderness dominated photography,
18:01 and Dorothy, I think, contributed
18:04 and lived in that particular world.
18:07 If you look, for example, at this work here,
18:10 which is a great favorite,
18:12 I think she herself remembered that she actually got down
18:15 to the same level as these children.
18:18 This one's taken, I think it was '59, wasn't it,
18:21 in Haifa town in Israel, and apparently it was a group
18:24 of both Arab, Muslim, and Jewish children playing together.
18:27 Now that's not immediately evident from the work,
18:30 but it's entirely in keeping with that sense of fellow humanity,
18:34 sort of common humanity is very striking.
18:44 I think the difference with her and other photographers
18:47 is that she's not just seeing the pictures,
18:50 she's feeling the pictures,
18:52 and so that emotion comes out in the imagery.
18:56 So you feel her pictures, you feel the passion in it,
18:59 you feel the emotion, the pathos, the humor, the irony,
19:03 that you get a sense like you are there on the street with her.
19:07 (music)
19:10 She is a photographer, like I consider myself a photographer.
19:21 I'm not just an artist who uses a camera,
19:24 whereas an artist might think, you know, in a way,
19:27 build a picture up like a bricklayer.
19:30 You know, he'd have a storyboard or a concept or try to do it,
19:34 and so what happens is the photography tends to be illustrating a concept.
19:38 Now, there's nothing wrong with that.
19:40 There's some fantastic photography,
19:42 but I like the way that it foregrounds your involvement with the world,
19:46 and I think you can see that through Dorothy's work as well.
19:50 (music)
19:53 (music)
19:56 In this image, which she took only a few years later
20:11 when she first went to New York,
20:13 you have three generations of one family,
20:15 and it's where everyone's looking.
20:17 The granny is making eye contact with the photographer.
20:21 The young woman is looking out as though into the future,
20:25 and the little girl, of course, is looking at her mother.
20:28 (music)
20:31 (music)
20:34 (music)
21:02 (music)
21:05 Let's go to England now.
21:09 Now, this is in Paddington in 1960,
21:14 and why did I take this?
21:16 Because I was amused about this and that.
21:20 There's got to be humour.
21:23 That's nice, isn't it?
21:25 I was taking it at a race,
21:29 and I think it's very much England, right?
21:34 Couldn't be anywhere else.
21:38 (train rumbling)
21:41 There was just one man sitting there,
22:05 he seemed quite motionless.
22:07 He seemed to have a bundle on his lap.
22:10 I was intrigued by the shape that this bundle made,
22:13 and I walked closer and I started to photograph.
22:17 I just stepped out for a smoke.
22:20 The bird come round with a smudge box
22:22 and I thought she was in a bit of a hurry,
22:24 you know, the photographer.
22:26 She had a little bit of a rabbit
22:29 and asked me about myself,
22:32 talking about animals.
22:34 I was trying to find what I was doing here, you know.
22:37 Very nice person.
22:40 Very sympathetic.
22:42 Not having your own roots anymore,
22:45 and so having to look at somewhere else,
22:47 because this is her adopted country.
22:49 They've lived in other countries,
22:51 but it's clear that the country where she feels most at home now
22:55 is Britain, but she still shows us things about it
22:59 that we don't see with our own eyes,
23:01 and that's the mark of a great photographer.
23:04 I took quite a few shots of this particular man with a cat.
23:10 I worked up to the image I have now selected,
23:14 because by that time,
23:16 the man didn't mind me getting closer,
23:20 he seemed quite relaxed.
23:22 I was attracted by his posture,
23:25 by the way his hands were hanging very limply down the side,
23:29 and the expression of the cat.
23:32 The slits of the eyes of the cat, a white cat,
23:36 looking like a parcel almost,
23:39 but somehow I found it very moving.
23:42 And there's always one picture, if you take a few, that works.
23:47 Something I remember very clearly
23:53 is having to knock on that darkroom door,
23:56 and that was the moment was right to go in
23:59 and watch the prints being developed.
24:02 My mum choosing the enlarger and using her hands
24:06 to create different light and shadow and stuff,
24:09 and then watching these pictures emerge from the tanks
24:12 and this wonderful ritual of the different tanks and things.
24:16 And the pictures coming up on the line, and the images emerging.
24:23 I remember a moment, for example, on summer holidays,
24:26 my dad would bring us back in time to start school again
24:29 at the end of the summer, and she would actually stay on,
24:32 and I think it was then that she roamed around Rome and Florence
24:36 and places like that, taking the pictures that she did,
24:39 which was obviously a rather unusual arrangement,
24:42 I guess, domestically speaking.
24:44 But I think she needed the freedom not to have to worry about us
24:48 and domestic commitments in order to function independently
24:52 as a professional photographer.
24:54 I first met Dorothy when she was Associate Director
24:57 of the Photographers' Gallery, which was then very new.
25:00 It was founded in 1971.
25:02 Dorothy was very much a presence there.
25:05 She built up the second-hand book collection,
25:07 which was, I think, a first for British photography scene
25:10 in those days, and also was in charge of the print room,
25:13 which gave her a chance indeed to promote the work
25:16 of other mostly younger photographers who, to this day,
25:19 often come up to her in different situations and say,
25:22 "Yes, you won't remember me, but you helped me a great deal."
25:25 Faye Godwin, for example.
25:27 Martin Parr, who I think would be the first to say that Dorothy
25:30 was very, very supportive.
25:32 He once sent her a very large brown paper envelope
25:36 with big writing in black felt tip,
25:39 addressed to the unstoppable Dorothy Bow.
25:42 She really does think that photography is important.
25:45 I think she wanted to establish that through her connections
25:49 with the Photographers' Gallery.
25:51 She will help photographers, and she's not...
25:53 A lot of people keep everything close to their chest
25:56 and don't share anything or whatever.
25:58 No, she's a very open person.
26:01 She had done so much for so many people.
26:05 She would selflessly mention the name to the collectors,
26:09 to the magazines, from time to time.
26:14 Things were not easy, you know,
26:17 and she would always, always speak so highly about my work
26:23 that it made...
26:26 It made it...
26:30 You could persevere a little bit more than you would otherwise, you know.
26:35 I think it was very important that Dorothy was working at the Gallery
26:40 because she met a lot of important photographers
26:44 and was able to talk to them and really absorb quite a bit from them.
26:49 Black-and-white photography was becoming anachronistic.
26:52 It became...it became a difficult, difficult thing to take,
26:57 and Dorothy was at a bit of a loss.
27:00 She got to know André Kertész,
27:02 the master of classic, elegant '20s black and white,
27:06 but he became fascinated by the properties of colour
27:10 and its sort of unnaturalness, its strangeness.
27:14 Well, by the time I got to 1982, '83, '84,
27:21 I felt, as I'd said, everything I wanted to in black and white,
27:26 and I was seriously considering possibly stopping to photograph.
27:32 And I visited André Kertész, and I saw the Polaroids,
27:39 and I came back, and for two years I did every morning photograph.
27:45 I learned to admire...
27:49 ..what colour could do.
27:59 If I'd been Polaroid people, I wouldn't use this sort of thing.
28:03 It's rather ugly.
28:05 It is more difficult to make a good colour picture than black and white.
28:24 To think that you would simply swap black and white for colour
28:29 and keep taking pictures, well, that's not a good concept, really.
28:34 You would have the perspective, you would have the bondage point,
28:39 you would have the line, and you must think colour.
28:44 (POLAROID CLIP, 'POLAROID CLIP')
28:47 For most of my life, and even for quite a chunk of yours,
29:01 black and white photography seemed more real.
29:04 Crazy, really, because the world isn't black and white, we see in colour.
29:08 (POLAROID CLIP, 'POLAROID CLIP')
29:11 You also get a development which is very strong in Dorothy,
29:24 and you see it with quite a number of photographers in colour,
29:27 who are, if you like, art photographers,
29:29 who aren't just doing it for the newspaper or the Adverdight,
29:32 is that abstraction gets stronger and stronger in the colour photographs,
29:37 and of course Dorothy has some very strong abstract colour pictures.
29:43 I think Dorothy understood that you really didn't need
29:47 to explain everything in a photograph.
29:49 You could leave bits unsaid, you could leave out some of the links,
29:54 and that would be even better for the viewer,
29:58 because we would have to make those links ourselves
30:01 and enter this dream she'd created.
30:04 (POLAROID CLIP, 'POLAROID CLIP')
30:07 I mean, there are works like these, which are more classic, I suppose,
30:32 and also more related to her gifts as a portraitist.
30:36 They're more about the mood, the body language of the human being
30:40 than they are about the complexity of the picture.
30:44 But then what does increasingly happen with the colour work,
30:48 which I personally find absolutely fascinating,
30:51 is you're not quite sure what you're looking at.
30:54 (POLAROID CLIP, 'POLAROID CLIP')
30:58 (POLAROID CLIP, 'POLAROID CLIP')
31:01 I mean, even that cover, there's two real bikes,
31:11 there's a real piece of sea, two real people, but it begins,
31:15 it's just beginning to be abstract, isn't it?
31:18 The shape is beginning to get stronger than any of the elements.
31:21 I try to create order out of chaos.
31:24 That is a subconscious thing, but it is there.
31:27 And when I look at my pictures,
31:30 I remember talking to a painter who said, "It's got to sing."
31:34 In other words, it has an in-built sense of order or harmony.
31:40 And I can never, even after all these years of shooting pictures,
31:46 release the shutter just haphazardly.
31:49 It isn't the fact that there's only one frame,
31:52 but when I release it, I've got to feel this is it.
31:55 It has what I call a beginning and an end.
31:58 In other words, it...it links.
32:01 There's a picture she took in Paris of a child dressed in white
32:05 who's rushing into this wonderful, minimalist, sculptural landscape
32:09 of grey and white striped marble.
32:12 And she must have sort of seen it in a flash.
32:15 There are two men who are in dark suits
32:19 and they're both looking to the left as if at a military command.
32:24 And it's all seen just in a split second and everything about it,
32:30 it's as if choreographed by an unseen film director, an unseen hand.
32:37 Kerses calls it the little happening.
32:39 Cartier-Bresson calls it a decisive moment.
32:42 But there's that moment when all the disparate elements
32:44 suddenly lock into one.
32:46 And that, of course, is what a lot of photographers are looking for.
32:48 And that's what makes what a great photographer will do
32:51 different from what I will do,
32:53 and I hesitate to say whether you will do,
32:55 is that, you know, I can see these three fascinating things,
32:59 but that moment when they actually lock into a coherent artistic whole,
33:04 I will miss it.
33:06 Well, I know she's always said, you know,
33:07 she could never have her camera with her all the time
33:09 because it would actually be too intense a way of living.
33:12 You couldn't function like that.
33:14 And it's certainly true to this very day
33:15 that she has to be in the right mood,
33:19 the light conditions have to be propitious,
33:23 and the stimuli have to be new enough.
33:27 And then once she's on kind of photo alert, as it were,
33:29 she takes on a sort of, I was going to say predatory,
33:32 it's not quite the right word,
33:33 but there's a very intense kind of look that comes into her eye,
33:36 almost like a hawk kind of homing in.
33:39 What photography does is to make you,
33:43 I could say, bold beyond your normal powers.
33:47 It's a way of shielding yourself.
33:49 On many occasions, actually being with her
33:52 when she was at large with her camera
33:54 and having to kind of be her eyes and ears,
33:57 because when she's taking pictures,
33:59 she is not aware of a cliff edge or a road bollard or anything like that.
34:04 So I remember my dad and us would be sort of hovering nervously
34:08 to protect her from the hazards of the world.
34:11 [Music]
34:39 I remember there was a statue at the entrance,
34:42 but it was one of the jobs in the photography department.
34:46 We had to take photographs of it.
34:48 It was a very happy atmosphere, despite the fact it was wartime.
34:53 We were young and we still believed, you know,
34:55 life was worth living.
34:58 [Music]
35:03 Hello, nice to see you again.
35:06 Hello, I'm Marshall.
35:09 I was the first person in my family to have gone to university.
35:13 Oh, it's a nice picture.
35:15 Oh, it's a lovely picture.
35:16 Oh, and there's my signature.
35:18 Absolutely.
35:19 My signature is just the same.
35:20 The photograph has been in the family ever since for 65 years.
35:25 That's wonderful, isn't it?
35:27 1950.
35:28 I think that's wonderful.
35:30 I don't like having my photograph taken,
35:32 so I was very apprehensive, and yet my mother was insistent
35:36 that I should have this photograph.
35:38 So I found it a really pleasant experience.
35:41 I didn't feel at all nervous or anxious,
35:44 and I think it shows, you know, smiling away.
35:47 Students knew, you know, if you wanted to have your photograph taken,
35:50 you would ask Dorothy Bowman, that was the--
35:52 Did you hear that?
35:53 [Music]
35:55 So how did you come to be living in Grange Avenue?
35:58 Because your dad had a friend who lived there,
36:04 and there was a room available right on top of an apartment house.
36:09 [Music]
36:15 This is Grange Avenue, Ma.
36:16 Grange Avenue.
36:17 What do you see number 11 on here, yes?
36:19 Oh, my God.
36:20 [Music]
36:25 11.
36:26 [Music]
36:27 Was it just one room?
36:29 Just one room.
36:31 I--at the top.
36:33 And it's for sale now.
36:35 We could live there now, couldn't we?
36:37 [Music]
36:43 Hume Hall coming up.
36:44 But that's where Louis lived there for many years,
36:48 and I remember that girlfriends were not supposed to come.
36:52 He smuggled me in because he wanted me to see his room.
36:56 [Music]
37:01 He came again earlier to study here, 1938.
37:06 So he had been here already.
37:09 We never spoke about the past.
37:13 It was too sad.
37:14 We lived in the present, and he had a very optimistic streak in him, fortunately.
37:25 My mother was somewhat more able--and I use that word quite consciously, you know,
37:29 to talk about things up to a point when we were younger, I think,
37:33 prompted by the fact that, as you know, her parents escaped and survived the war.
37:38 My father's situation was very different.
37:41 It was his mother and his sister who perished,
37:43 and you absolutely can't get any closer than that,
37:46 and he absolutely did not talk about it.
37:49 And I didn't see it as a problem necessarily at the time.
37:52 I realize now that it was his profound desire to both protect us from tragic knowledge
37:59 but also himself because he was on the surface a very sort of balanced,
38:05 almost serene kind of human being.
38:07 When Louis died, I mean, it was such a long, intense love affair
38:12 and such a partnership through life.
38:15 She would be the first to say she was tremendously lucky
38:18 that they started in a very impoverished way with no guarantees of anything.
38:25 Dorothy and Louis were the only people I knew who exemplified
38:34 what I'd have thought of as a proper cultural outlook,
38:38 which I'd read about as happening in Europe,
38:42 but I'd seen no trace of it in Britain at all.
38:45 They knew something about music and the arts,
38:48 and they knew about Braque and Duffy and Picasso and all these people,
38:52 and they were like a dream.
38:54 It was only later when I suddenly realized that actually
38:57 she was going off all over the world with Louis,
39:00 who was wonderful and very friendly and very supportive.
39:03 Wherever she went when they traveled around the world,
39:06 you know that he's having a business meeting or doing whatever.
39:09 She just slides off and mingles and gets wonderful photographs.
39:14 And now she still, as she heard her father's voice,
39:17 she still listens to Louis' voice.
39:20 So every so often, you know, we'll go out to lunch and I'll say,
39:24 "It's my turn," and about one time in three or maybe ten I'll win,
39:29 but usually she says, "No, no, no, I can hear Louis.
39:31 "No, I have to take you out, so I'm not the other way round."
39:34 She listens to him and she knows he's there sort of with her still,
39:38 and that's very important.
39:40 The man who was wonderful for me, to whom I owe everything good in my life,
39:46 Louis, when he died, I thought, "No, I can't possibly carry on."
39:51 And then I thought he'd be ashamed of me,
39:54 and so would my father be ashamed of me.
39:57 And photography helped me, and I've done a lot.
40:01 And Louis, who encouraged me such a lot, never saw how much...
40:05 You know, I've had so many books, something like 15 publications.
40:09 (PIANO MUSIC)
40:11 In mainland Greece, 1950s,
40:22 I watched this woman, and she came up and brought me flowers.
40:29 I have always found it an advantage to be a woman as a photographer.
40:39 Not a disadvantage on the country.
40:42 I think women are often seen as less threatening or intimidating.
40:47 I mean, that very famous picture of the Arab-Israeli children playing,
40:52 she's always had this playful side and she's managed to put people at ease.
40:56 And they sort of open up to her,
40:59 and in some ways it's even easier now she's a little bit older.
41:02 Well, she's venerably older.
41:04 She's a mature lady in her 90s, and she hasn't stopped photographing yet,
41:08 because people see that as completely non-threatening.
41:10 The photographer has to surrender something in themself.
41:14 There has to be a reciprocity.
41:16 So if you want your subject to surrender something of themselves
41:20 and reveal something, you in turn have to give of yourself.
41:24 You have to make yourself open and vulnerable.
41:26 And not everybody can do that.
41:28 I think Dorothy does that magnificently, again,
41:31 because she is open, warm, passionate, emotional, honest.
41:36 I remember being very moved when she once said,
41:46 "I'm really alive when I'm taking pictures."
41:58 It's always been really important to her to have this security here,
42:04 where her own immediate family here,
42:07 and her own photography here will never leave her.
42:10 And every time she's tried to put down her camera and give up on photography,
42:13 because she's had a moment of despair, or she's decided she's too old,
42:17 she's always gone back to it.
42:19 She speaks immensely well about everybody.
42:23 That is the goodness which is shining from Dorothy.
42:28 She's a good human being, and it comes from the pictures too.
42:33 All my life, of all the jobs I did, I think I've only learned one real lesson.
42:39 The difference between the failures and the successes is energy.
42:43 Photography is in Dorothy's bloodstream, and she said she would never give it up.
42:52 What is interesting is the fact that you can keep taking pictures till your last breath.
42:58 There are people who are half her age,
43:01 who haven't got the energy and enthusiasm that she's got.
43:04 I think her legacy will be her devotion to photography
43:15 as a critical means of expression and reflection of the time that the photographer was living in.
43:24 I think there should be a special dispensation from God, or whomever,
43:29 that some people get to be immortal.
43:31 I wish Dorothy was that.
43:33 I think reputation is always a kind of evolutionary process, isn't it?
43:41 She's quite bemused now by all the attention she's getting,
43:45 not just her photography but also the poignancy of her life story.
43:48 It actually strikes a real chord, I think, in many much younger people.
43:51 I can only say that to me photography has been a very important part of my life.
44:06 Although being a wife and a mother have meant a lot, obviously.
44:13 But the kind of joy I have when I look back at what I've managed to do,
44:25 I can say sometimes I'm quite proud of it.
44:28 So, it's good.
44:30 [Music]
44:55 [Music fades]
44:57 [Music fades]