Breaks in Communication

In the 1980s, André Kertesz encouraged Dorothy Bohm to switch to color film. Immediately thereafter, torn advertising posters, graffiti, and vernacular murals began to emerge as one of the persistent themes in her work. If their initial appeal for her was their seductive visuality, their deeper significance arguably stems from her history as a Lithuanian refugee who lost touch with most of her family when she immigrated there as a teenager in 1939. A sense of loss is acute and ever-present in her compelling images of witty and melancholic transient worlds.