Quite a few countries all over the world celebrate today International Workers' Day or May Day. An inspiration (not just for today)? Industrial photography.
One of the most famous industrial photographers was Maurice Broomfield (this year it's also his 100th birth anniversary; he was born in 1916 and died in 2010)
Born in Draycott, Derbyshire, Broomfield was the son of a lacemaker and as a teenager he worked as a lathe operator at a Rolls-Royce plant, studying in the evenings at Derby College of Art.
Broomfield had a passion for drawing and would often come up with sketches that moved from his industrial surroundings. Inspired by painters such as Joseph Wright and Johannes Vermeer, after the war he started taking photographs, mainly focusing on factories and industries. He opened a studio in partnership with the established commercial and portrait photographer Yevonde Cumbers Middleton, known as Madame Yevonde.
Soon he was commissioned by leaders of industry to take pictures of their plants set all over the world: he travelled for British manufacturing group Hawker Siddeley and worked for the Financial Times between 1945 and 1960. Broomfield also began exhibiting widely, curating and presenting his work at the Royal Photographic Society; he represented the UK at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.
Broomfield conceived the industry as a stage on which the workers moved: he was passionate about taking pictures of all of them, from welders and fettlers to oilworkers, passing through hatmakers, as the workers were testament to Britain's productivity and prosperity. The photographer often lingered on precise details such as coloured scarves donned by women or male workers in suits and hats, garments and accessories they were allowed to wear before safety equipment arrived on the scene.
There are great stories about the backgrounds of some of Broomfield's images: in 1966, while taking pictures of workers in a milk factory in Wiltshire, he came up with the idea of painting their boots white to make them stand out. The idea worked so well that the plant managers adopted it making white boots compulsory.
Broomfield's images were intended to inform, but quite often they became real artworks also thanks to the use of dramatic lighting and unconventional camera angles favoured by the photographer. Yet there's more behind these pictures: Broomfield's photographs are definitely important records of the manufacturing culture in Great Britain, but they should also make us think about the manufacturing processes being exported to countries offering cheaper labour, or about the jobs changing with the advent of a digital world that has turned many of us into passive onlookers rather than active workers.
It is not rare indeed to find ourselves trapped in a world of Instagrams documenting more or less nothing, from celebrities taking selfies to perfectly composed images of exotic meals and fancy cakes or colourful wardrobes crammed with clothes and shoes. Life has changed and thanks to automatisation specific jobs do not exist anymore, but maybe looking again at a defunct world of looms, laboratories, car factories and cooling towers can teach us a few things about our society. Or we could maybe apply Broomfield's teachings to other fields: his angle and passion for visual reports of workers could indeed become the starting point for a new series of pictures documenting for example new fashion worlds, from ateliers to sweatshops.
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