About

Industrial Sublime brings together Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic photographs capturing factories and their workers in an era of rapid transition, depicting the remnants of the industrial revolution alongside emerging technologies.

Bradford Museums are thrilled to welcome Industrial Sublime, an exhibition bringing them together, on tour from the V&A Museum in South Kensington.

Maurice Broomfield (1916 – 2010) made some of the most spectacular photographs of industry in the 20th century. His work spans the rise of post-war industrial Britain in the 1950s to its slow decline into the early 1980s. From shipyards to papermills, and textiles production to car manufacture – he emphasised the dramatic, sublime and sometimes surreal qualities of factory work across the UK.

When he left school in 1931 at the age of 15 he started work in the local Rolls-Royce factory as that’s what you did. Not long in to the job he saw a photo of a retiring employee being handed a gold watch and realised that this was a person who’d never had any control over his own life. Maurice decided he wanted something more from his life.