Robert Bloomfield moved to Edinburgh from Yorkshire and studied medicine in the city, while living a second life as a pioneering street photographer who shifted between college students, locals and the Scottish capital’s landscape. Curator Daryl Green said he was “surprised” that Bloemfield, who was described as “a discreet approach, flying on the wall”, remained relatively unknown for so long. Waiting for Prince Philip, 1958, by Robert Blomfield. Photo: Robert Blomfield Estate “In his work, we feel the echo of older street photographers such as Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and we can discern the rich attachment to the place we see in contemporaries such as Robert Frank and William Klein,” he said. “As his vast archive slowly comes to light, it is clear that Robert was Edinburgh’s silent response to Oscar Marzaroli of Glasgow, Brasai, Paris.” Born in Leeds and raised in Sheffield, Bloomfield received his first camera on his 15th birthday and continued to photograph until his death in December 2020, but his work – which is said to have been inspired by the saying of Robert Capa “If your photos are not good enough, you are not close enough” – he was largely invisible during his lifetime. The exhibition, entitled Robert Blomfield: Student of Light, at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied, is the second major research on his work and follows an exhibition at the City Art Center in Edinburgh in 2018. Blomfield arrived in Edinburgh to study medicine in 1956 and took a camera with him almost everywhere, even in the classroom, creating plans for lectures and workshops that are described as unique in their access and composition. At the end of 2021, his archive of original prints, films and color slides from Scotland was deposited at the Research Collections Center of the University of Edinburgh. His images include smoke-filled atmospheric shots inside the student union as sunlight passes through the windows, while images of an anatomy lecture, a rowing competition and a crowd waiting to see Prince Philip in 1958 give a sense of its scope. life in the city in the 50s and 60s. Bloemfield took eight years to complete a six-year degree and stayed in Edinburgh after graduating in 1964 to begin as a junior doctor at the city’s Royal Clinic. The Student of Light focuses on the Blomfield era as a student and will present its camera equipment, including lenses, magnifiers, filters and an astronomical telescope used to achieve great depth of field. In the mid-1960s, Blomfield was regularly seen with two cameras around his neck. Both were usually loaded with black and white film and equipped with different lenses, but occasionally shot color film. Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7 p.m. BST “Although he had been experimenting with color since his school years, it was not a regular part of his repertoire,” Green said. “Color film was more expensive and had to be sent to a lab to grow, and when the slides returned, Robert never enlarged them to print himself.”
