Dorothy Bohm has lived a full and colourful life. Born in Konigsberg in East Prussia to a Jewish-Lithuanian family in 1924, she was sent to England before the outbreak of war to escape Nazism.

By 1942 she had graduated from Manchester College of Technology and started work in a portrait studio in the centre of the city, before opening her own business, Studio Alexander, in 1946. Since then, she has travelled widely, living in Paris, New York and San Francisco before settling in London’s leafy Hampstead in 1956, where she still lives today.

Further trips took her to Soviet Russia, Egypt and the Far East, photographing contemporary life along the way, and she also managed to fit in time to have two daughters and co-found The Photographers’ Gallery in 1971. She was its associate director for the next 15 years, then in 1998 founded the Focus Gallery for Photography.

Her black-and-white photography was justly celebrated early on, and in 1969 her street images were exhibited alongside work by Don McCullin, Tony Ray-Jones and Enzo Ragazzini at the ICA.

André Kertész, no less, encouraged her to switch to colour film in the late 1970s. “I find that colour requires a different sensitivity,” she wrote. “Reality and unreality mix more harmoniously. The emotional appeal of colour to me is very strong, it does not say the same thing as black-and-white.”

And now Bohm’s work is being given its first really major retrospective in the UK, The World Observed, showing for four months from 22 April at the Manchester Art Gallery, and in 2011 it will travel to The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.

Including work from all 60 years of her career, the exhibition will also feature a reconstruction of her first studio and darkroom.