Robert Bloomfield

Although artistically inclined since early on, I came to photography quite late, in the second year of a fine art ceramics degree at Bretton Hall, University of Leeds. When asked to start documenting my work as part of my studies I tentatively picked up a 35mm film camera and was immediately hooked. I have been using photography exclusively as my medium of expression from that moment onwards.

After graduating I joined an artist’s studio group in Leeds and found that a photographer was much in demand by the painters and sculptors (and rock bands) I was sharing the studios with. I began to assist, but also began to take assignments for object and exhibition shots for many of the major galleries and museums in the north of England. At the same time, working on artistic projects with ex-CUD drummer Stephen Goodwin, I exhibited in Europe and the UK prolifically over a two-year period and on the strength of this work I gained a place on the Masters programme in Image and Communication at Goldsmiths College, London. While there I continued to take photographs of artists and also began to photograph dance, working with a number of established and emerging dance companies across London.

Living in London and based in studios in Hackney and New Cross I became deeply immersed in an interrogation of the photograph as an object and its qualities as a surface. Teaching increasingly became an important part of my creative spectrum and this period of studio work supported my role as course leader in art and design at Ealing Hammersmith and West London College. This interest in education has continued into my current roles at OCA, as Lecturer in Photography at Kensington and Chelsea College and as an assessor for Edexcel.

Eclecticism is a major feature of my photographic practice. The flexibility of photography allows me to respond to and investigate a multiplicity of questions and subjects, from exploring the tension between painting and photography to the fine art of studio lighting and the liminal space between urban and suburban. Recent practice-based projects include a publication on a new sculpture park in Basildon (‘Visions of a New Town’) and the beginnings of a landscape project in the vast metropolitan area of Nagoya in Japan.

It’s an interesting time to be a photographer. There is an enormous critical and creative focus on the medium. New technologies continually challenge its status. It has no problem whatsoever remaining utterly contemporary. It is contentious, argued and debated over endlessly, loved, disliked and feared, probably in equal measure. It is enormously versatile. Like many people, and its almost a cliché to say it, I always wanted to be a painter, but the seduction, fascination and sheer possibility of this thing has never let me go.