Previously unseen work by a photographer who captured life in Edinburgh and has been compared to the great Henri Cartier-Bresson is to go on display at an exhibition in the city where he lived and worked.
Robert Blomfield moved to Edinburgh from Yorkshire and studied medicine in the city while living a second life as a pioneering street photographer who shifted between shooting university students, locals and the landscape of the Scottish capital.
The curator Daryl Green said it was “astounding” that Blomfield, who was described as taking “an unobtrusive, fly-on-the-wall approach”, has remained relatively unknown for so long.
“In his work, we sense echoes of earlier street photographers like Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and we can discern the rich attachment to place that we see in contemporaries such as Robert Frank and William Klein,” he said.
“As his vast archive slowly comes into light, it is clear that Robert was Edinburgh’s quiet answer to Glasgow’s Oscar Marzaroli, to Paris’s Brassaï.”
Born in Leeds and raised in Sheffield, Blomfield received his first camera on his 15th birthday and continued taking photographs until his death in December 2020, but his work – which was said to be inspired by Robert Capa’s adage, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” – was largely unseen during his lifetime.
The exhibition, titled Robert Blomfield: Student of Light, at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied, is the second major survey of his work and follows a show at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh in 2018.
Blomfield arrived in Edinburgh to study medicine in 1956 and took a camera with him almost everywhere, even into class, producing shots of lectures and laboratories that are described as unique in their access and composition.
In late 2021, his archive of original prints, film and colour slides from Scotland was deposited in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections.
His images include atmospheric smoke-filled shots inside the student union as sunlight streams in through windows, while images of an anatomy lecture, a rowing contest, and crowds waiting to see Prince Philip in 1958 give a sense of the breadth of student life in the city in the 50s and 60s.
Blomfield took eight years to complete a six-year degree, and he stayed in Edinburgh after graduating in 1964 to start as a junior doctor at the city’s royal infirmary.
Student of Light focuses on Blomfield’s time as a student and will showcase some of his camera equipment, including lenses, enlargers, filters and an astronomical telescope used to achieve a large depth of field.
By the mid-1960s, Blomfield was regularly seen with two cameras around his neck. Both were usually loaded with black-and-white film and fitted with different lenses, but he would occasionally shoot colour film.
“Although he had experimented with colour since his school days, it wasn’t a regular part of his repertoire,” said Green. “Colour film was more expensive and had to be sent off to a lab to be developed, and when the slides returned, Robert never enlarged them to prints himself.”
Robert Blomfield: Student of Light is supported by the Scottish Funding Council and will run from from 6 May to 1 October at the University of Edinburgh main library.
