LIFE in late 1950s and early 1960s Edinburgh is captured in an exhibition of photographs on display in the city until March 17.
Part of a previously unseen archive, Robert Blomfield: Edinburgh Street Photography features around 60 black and white images showing how the technological and cultural developments of the time were changing the city.
Born in Sheffield in 1938, Blomfield was a keen photographer by his teens, having been influenced by his father, a radio-therapist with his own dark-room. When the 18-year-old Blomfield moved to Edinburgh to study medicine, he took with him an admiration for the fly-on-the-wall approach of French photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau and his two Nikon F SLRs cameras.
The pair accompanied Blomfield everywhere, taking his sensitive, often dramatic or humorous shots of children playing, student life and ordinary city folk set against an urban landscape – much of which was being remade anew. Blomfield developed his images in a make-shift dark-room set up in his student digs in Edinburgh, which he left in 1966 after graduating. Four years later he had abandoned black and white photography and developing his own work, but continued to document city life in the likes of Leeds, London and Sheffield while simultaneously pursuing his medical career.
After a stroke in 1999, his family began to catalogue his vast collection, which numbers into “the thousands”, according to his brother Johnny, who has digitised the Edinburgh shots in time for the year of Robert’s 80th birthday. Fifty years after they were taken, photographs form a visual archive of an era shifting between post-war drabness and optimistic futurism.
“After 50 years I’m thrilled to be able to share some of my pictures with the wider world,” says Blomfield, now retired and living in Hebden Bridge. “Edinburgh is a city that remains close to my heart, and the interaction of its residents with this most dramatic of urban stages provided me with endless inspiration as a young photographer. The exhibition represents a personal view of life on its streets during the 1960s.”
Until March 17 (not Jan 1 & 2), City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 10am to 5pm, free. www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk
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