Photography Collection: Peter Bloomfield

Photographer Peter Bloomfield was commissioned by Henry Wrong - the first Managing Director of the Barbican Centre - to photograph the final stages of the arts centre’s construction up to its opening in 1982.

The photographs form the Building the Brutal photography collection, which you can find out more about here.

As a schoolboy Peter Bloomfield used to ride his bicycle round the bombsites of the City of London during the Second World War. As he rode around, he would take note of the names of the destroyed streets.

It was good preparation for photographing the emergence of the Barbican Centre and Estate from the rubble decades later.

Bloomfield started off taking pictures of the Barbican site using an old-fashioned looking camera, made by the Gandolfi company.

It meant putting a black cloth over his head as he took the photographs, to stop light getting in and ruining the images.

Later he switched his camera to a more portable Sinar Monorail.

It was still bulky by the standards of modern digital equipment, and still involved carrying around a tripod and film.

To better capture the scale and details of the evolving site, Bloomfield also moved  from 5 x 4-inch film to 6 x 7, the largest available at the time.

Peter Bloomfield’s images of the Barbican site were rediscovered in 2016, and published as a book titled Building the Brutal.