Images of Mexico - some taken 70 years ago by Hampstead photographer Dorothy Bohm - go on display at a Somers Town gallery.
They were captured during trips to the country between the 1950s and 1970s, and include some photographs shown for the first time.
The 98-year-old was born into a Jewish family in Konigsberg Germany - now Kaliningrad, Russia - and was sent to England for safety in 1939.
Her father gifted her a camera just as she left. She told the Ham&High: “My father was wanted by the Nazis and, because he had done a lot of business with Manchester, he got me a visa in June 1939.
"He had a Leica and loved photographing things. I wasn’t interested in it at all but fate is a very strange thing and, as I leant out of the railway carriage to say goodbye, he took off his Leica and said: ‘This might be useful to you.'”
She went on to enrol on a vocational photography course in Manchester and work as a portrait photographer's assistant before setting up her own portrait studio in 1947.
She and husband Louis Bohm - a fellow refugee - travelled widely to Switzerland, Paris, and in 1956 to the US, during which she first visited Mexico.
Bohm had been drawn to street photography since living in Paris in the late 1940s, and a move to Hampstead in 1957 was followed by a shift away from portraiture to capturing life on the streets.
Bohm's first solo exhibition was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1969. She co-founded Covent Garden's Photographer's Gallery in 1971, and served as associate director for 15 years.
Her friendship with Manuel Alvarez Bravo, known as the "godfather" of Mexican photography inspired an extended trip to Mexico where she visited colonial towns and the surrounding countryside. Of the people she captured in Oaxaca, Michoacán, Yucatán she says: "I found them so beautiful."
The images feature urban and rural landscapes, fields and plains studded with agave and cacti and ancient cultivation on the cusp of industrialisation.
In her catalogue essay Amanda Hopkinson says Bohm was part of a strong tradition of post WWII "humanitarian photography".
"Dorothy’s approach has never been anthropological. For her, capturing differences - in dress and hairstyles or manners of standing and sitting - is integral to the larger composition. This makes every image a stand-alone rather than a piece of the story: each is the story.
"Her photographs are taken with respect; they are never quaint, still less do they exoticise or patronise."
Dorothy Bohm still lives in Hampstead and her work is held in collections from The Tate to the V&A and National Portrait Gallery.
Dorothy Bohm Mexico 1950s-1970s runs September 2 to October 1 at Somers Gallery, 96 Chalton Street, NW1. Visit somersgallery.com
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