My Father and Me 2019

Nick Broomfield turns the camera on his relationship with his late father Maurice – with uncharacteristically heartwarming results.

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My Father and Me paints an affectionate, even at times gently teasing portrait of the industrial photographer Maurice Broomfield, featuring many of his strikingly framed photos of British factories and their products intended to show “the beauty and might of post-war industrial Britain”. Often, we’re told, he would gain special permission to shoot at night, when the geometric elegance of a giant cogwheel or a nest of steel tubes could be enhanced by dramatic, almost Hollywoodised lighting. And the factory workers themselves are frequently shown as isolated, quasi-heroic figures – or else as part of a lively social life organised in and around the factory, where many of them worked their whole lives.

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