Promethean grandeur: Maurice Broomfield – Industrial Sublime, at the V&A, reviewed

When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper pipes on a turret lathe. That was what you did in Derby in 1931: Rolls-Royce was the town’s biggest employer, and entire generations expected to pass the best part of their lives behind the walls of its 13-acre plant. But Broomfield didn’t stay. Not long into his new job, he saw a photo of an ageing employee being packed off into retirement with a handshake and a gold watch. This was a person who’d never had any real control over his own life; who’d worked when he was told to, and stopped when they told him it was time. Broomfield wanted something else.

When he returned to the factories after the war, it was as a photographer. He shot workers bottling salad cream in Bermondsey, and buffing a ship’s propeller in Glasgow; in one series of more than 100 prints he turned the camera on the hidden entrails of his own art, documenting the factories where Ilford Ltd made photo paper and glass plate negatives. But his greatest works were the ones made of nothing but heat and fire. In ‘Tapping a Furnace’ (1954), shot at the Ford plant in Dagenham, a single figure stands in a vast empty space, emptying molten steel from a crucible. No light, except the volcanic glow of the furnace: pure livid potential. In ‘Wire Manufacture’ (1964) a worker stands at a machine cutting wire, but the metal coils dissolve into the halo of wild sparks around him. There’s a cathedral-like grandeur in these photos, something Promethean: tiny human figures, in control of so much raw fire. But they were never really in control: Maurice Broomfield was. He made sure of that.