Unearth a remarkable collection of never-before-seen color images from the groundbreaking 1970 Glastonbury Festival. Captured by the late Robert Blomfield, a doctor and part-time hippy with a deep-seated passion for photography, these images offer a unique glimpse into the Pilton Pop Folk and Blues festival at Worthy Farm.
The late Robert Blomfield, an unconventional blend of a doctor and part-time hippy with an unyielding passion for photography, documented these extraordinary images during the 1970 Pilton Pop Folk and Blues festival at Worthy Farm.
Photographs chronicling this momentous, yet often overlooked event, are a rarity and were predominantly captured in black and white. However, Robert utilized Kodachrome film to bring forth a captivating series of images that encapsulate the laid-back, unstructured ambiance of Michael Eavis’s inaugural stint as a festival host, as showcased in our gallery below.
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When Michael Eavis made the decision to open his dairy farm fields to host the Pilton Pop Folk and Blues festival, Robert and his wife Jane had recently moved to London from Edinburgh, where he had pursued studies in medicine. Borrowing a sky blue VW campervan, they embarked on a journey to Somerset for the weekend with their toddler son, Will, who commemorated his second birthday at the festival, although he has no recollection of the event today.
“My parents had caught wind of the Pilton festival through the hippy grapevine swirling around the city; there were even murmurs that Jimi Hendrix might perform. Hendrix was indeed in London at the time but tragically passed away the day before the festival, just a few hundred yards from where my parents lived in Bayswater,” recounted Will on GlastoFestFeed.
Robert, who had been capturing life in black and white since his teenage years in the 1950s, chronicling everyday existence in Scotland, Sheffield, and London, and developing the photos himself, had recently started using color slide film in his reliable Nikon camera. This became his medium of choice as he turned his lens towards the approximately 1,500 individuals who flocked to Worthy Farm in 1970.
Fast forward more than fifty years, and anyone with a mobile phone can capture unlimited digital photos. However, in the past, film and processing were expensive, imbuing each shot with significance.
Robert possessed an innate sense of timing, knowing precisely when to click the shutter for the perfect image.