Workshop photos capture old Britain

The images, superb in their detail and rich in their flavour of the times, are the work of Emsworth's Maurice Broomfield.

Through his lens Maurice captured Britain at work in the 1950s and 1960s.

His carefully-crafted photographs of industries such as nylon, insulation and shipbuilding now stand as a unique record of an industrial Britain which has long since changed beyond recognition.

Maurice's exhibition A New Look At Industry runs until May 9 - a perfect illustration of the way he elevated industrial photography to the level of fashion photography, adopting an approach which allowed it not just to capture the detail, but to become an artform in its own right.

Maurice, who was born in 1916, took the view that the products of British industry were marvellous and that they should be celebrated - and that meant a radical refocusing of the way the photographer worked.

"My approach to photography was different to the accepted form. They were used to getting a photographer and telling him where to stand and what to take pictures of. He would press the button and three days later he would bring the pictures back."

The bosses were proud of the way their factories had been converted, of the way old cotton mills had become engineering works - and it was this they wanted to concentrate on, instructing the photographers to produce long shots: " "But I disagreed with that. I wanted to concentrate on close shots of the people and the products. It was very controversial."

Maurice ran into resistance, but he stuck to his guns: "To me, it seemed to be logical. I can understand that they wanted to show how wonderfully the buildings had been adapted and they took the people in them and the products for granted. For me, it was a very uphill fight!"

But Maurice was driven by patriotism and pride. Poverty and unemployment were no strangers. He knew the ill-effects of economic depression.

"I felt that it was necessary to make the best of what we were good at and to sell our products."

Through his work, Maurice set out to celebrate the achievements of British industry. His photographs, imbued with romance and optimism, demonstrate an era content to value skilled manual labour in a way which has now been lost.

For Maurice, there were two key inspirations, the first being his father's wonderful skill at calligraphy: "He did this wonderful gold-leaf lettering. I look at his work and I think of what I have achieved, and I realise he was brilliant. He was absolutely marvellous."

The second major influence was the artist Joseph Wright and his paintings - first glimpsed during childhood visits to Derby Museum with his father. It was from Wright that Maurice learned to '˜eliminate the unnecessary' through carefully-staged lighting, a lesson continued by the Bauhaus school and evident in Maurice's spare, beautifully-composed images.

"Wright stuck in my mind because of his one light source treatment. You get a candle in some of these religious paintings and it lights up the fact of the Madonna and the rest of it goes into darkness. The light draws the eye to the subject. This appealed to me and I applied it to photography. It's about concentrating on the necessary."

It was a principal well understood in the world of fashion photography; Maurice brought it into the world of industrial photography.

Maurice's own career trajectory began in the factories on the assembly line at Rolls Royce after leaving school at 15 and it was here that he drew inspiration from his fellow

workers and the drama of industry.

This was followed by a spell as exhibition designer at Rowntree's while studying graphics at Derby College in the evenings. Maurice's first love was painting but he turned to photography in the 1940s, travelling across Europe with the late Stephen Peet to film and photograph students recovering from enforced labour in the post war cities. Later a recommendation prompted the ICI factories to approach Maurice with a commission, kick-starting a series of corporate commissions which continued throughout the next couple of decades.

Inevitably, much of what Maurice photographed has now been lost or is now under threat. His passion for industry still burns bright. Maurice deeply laments the closure of the Cadbury factories.

"It really saddens me because the pride of the workmanship has been replaced by greed and money. People's destinies have changed and they don't have control. People in industries have a feeling of uneasiness about the future. Before, the future was taken for granted. It was like belonging to a family.

"In life we give a blank cheque very often to people that are going to employ us and we trust them because our working life is spent wanting to be able to do something that feels worthwhile. But all that gets shattered in a new system of rules where those feelings of security can really no longer apply. It must be very disheartening."

Which makes it all the more important, in hindsight, that Maurice was there to capture for posterity British industry at its height.

"I started out thinking '˜What shall I do in life?' I was looking for something that would give me that satisfaction of a purposeful way of life. In a way I spent so long looking around that I realised that perhaps my career was actually finding out what other people do."

And recording it'¦

Workshop photos capture old Britain