John Blakemore

John Blakemore (born 1936), is an English photographer who has worked in documentary, landscape, still life and hand made books.

Blakemore was born 15 July 1936 in Coventry and was educated at the John Gulson School.

His grandfather's love of horses and the countryside influenced his taking his first job on a local farm, which he left after a disagreement with the owner on farming methods, before working as a grower in Warwickshire and Shropshire.

Self-taught in photography, he discovered the medium when, required to undertake National Service, he signed on with the Royal Air Force as a medical orderly in Tripoli 1954-56, an experience that confirmed his pacifism.

He ordered a Kodak Retina IIc from Aden, and commenced photographing his surroundings in North Africa and learned the basics in the darkroom of the military camp.

Blakemore's wartime childhood experiences, and seeing Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition in an edition of Picture Post sent to him in Libya by his mother, were both influential.

Steichen's documentary exhibition was shown at London's Royal Festival Hall, Aug 1–30, 1956, and Blakemore regarded it as "a way of showing people what the world was like. I saw photography very much as a possible way of changing society".

It inspired him initially on his return home to photograph the people of Coventry and its post-war reconstruction as a freelance 1956-58 with the Black Star photo agency.

He meantime worked on personal projects on Hillfields, an area in transition, and the production in Coventry Cathedral of West Side Story.

However, magazines that would publish such stories were then diminishing in face of the rise of television.

In 1958 he married and became director of Taylor Brothers Studio in Coventry, and then in a variety of studios including Richard Sadler Studio (1962-3) and Courtaulds of Coventry (1963-68) where he was initially employed as a black and white printer before being promoted to a photographer's position, then over 1968-9 worked at Hilton Studios, London.

Harry Nankin places Blakemore amongst those, including "Walter Chappell, William Clift, Wynn Bullock, Frederick Sommer, Sally Mann in the United States; [...] Thomas Joshua Cooper in the UK; and John Cato and Ian Lobb in Australia," who from the mid-1960s used landscape to, in Minor White's words, "express their feelings of being at one with nature”.

He taught the medium full time from 1970.

He remarried in 1970 and worked thenceforth as a freelance again.

In the early 1970s Blakemore joined his friend Richard Sadler as a lecturer at Derby College of Art under Bill Gaskins.

He was influential on the younger generation who, as Eamonn McCabe reports "can count themselves lucky: he is a man of immense charm and warmth and he knows the problems his students have to face. Sadler notes that;"Gaskins was leading a course now regarded as initiating a revival of both landscape and creative photography in Britain at that time.

The course was simultaneously laying the cornerstone of a new style of photographic education, the effects of which are still being felt today.

For John, this meant the sharing of his technical expertise and his creative ideas in the teaching of students.

The course required and encouraged both tutors and students to achieve photographic excellence in liaison with cutting edge organisations of the day.

These ideals appealed to John, and he worked hard at their achievement.

Blakemore had his first solo show, a documentary series Area in Transition at the Coventry College of Art, but after receiving a 1974 grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain he concentrated on his landscapes in the north-west of Scotland, North Wales and Derbyshire; he received further bursaries from the Arts Council in 1976 and 1979.

Among the earliest reviews of Blakemore's work was Merete Bates' in The Guardian of 13 October 1975, critiquing his show in Impressions Gallery held alongside photojournalism by Bert Hardy;

"John Blakemore concentrates on landscape. His photographs are small, personal, intense, and search out poetic images that have particularly human relevance. Wounds of Trees for example, focus on bark goudged and scarred like flesh, on branches gnarled and knotted like rheumatism, on trees bare and dying among surrounding foliage. In Metamorphoses, water freezes and thaws. Even in the more traditional seascape of sunrise over Mawdach Estuary, Blakemore conveys a peculiar, still, sharp melancholy. His failure, if any, does not arise from lack of visison, but from insufficiently pursued images. There is an overall darkness in the prints that almost obscures the content. And even Wounds of Trees could be more decisively, dramatically shot."

Bryn Campbell, reviewing the Creative Camera International Year Book 1976, notes of the portfolio of eleven pictures by Blakemore included beside sets by Lisette Model (12 pics.), Ansel Adams and Marketa Luscanova, that;"in an annual strongly weighted by landscape pictures, it is encouraging that there are none more clearly seen-as Weston would say-nor with more dignity than the very best by John Blakemore."

"'I have loved John's work for many years, following his progressions from dark to light, stillness to flux, landscape to 'inscape' Not only is he one of the very best teachers in Britain, for me he has been one of the most consistently creative artists working in Britain during the last 20 years. For several years I felt that his work had not been receiving proper recognition. The only publication of his work was a 1977 Arts Council book of his early landscapes. Mainstream publishers were too short-sighted to seize the opportunity, but last year the tiny unfunded gallery, Zelda Cheatle, with huge vision, published a stunning collection of his work, entitled Inscape, sumptuously printed by Jackson Wilson. A major retrospective of John's work was launched in Derby, where he teaches, and is touring the country. The successive themes in John's work are well represented, and the final work submitted for this Prize explores the timeless metaphysical themes of life and death with poetic resonance, great beauty and awesome assurance."

By 1989, with rise of Postmodernism, when Blakemore was included in Through the Looking Glass at the Barbican Centre, photographer and critic Eamonn McCabe positioned him as a traditionalist;"The present day teachers are well represented in the show and fall into two categories – photographers who work in the traditional sense such as John Blakemore, whose subtle land scapes and pictures of tulips (a current passion) contrast with the conceptual artist Victor Burgin, who is one of the main links between avant-garde art and photography."

Nevertheless, McCabe, in a review two years later, just as digital imaging was becoming viable, makes clear his respect for Blakemore as a "craftsman", with "fingernails stained brown after hours immersed in developer" and accounts for the photographer's resort to still life;

"He is fascinated by the complexity of form and a glance at an original print confirms his commitment, and superb printing skills. His early post-photojournalism work was rooted in the landscape, as he enjoyed its beauty. Photography for him has always been about discovery and, with the use of multiple exposures, he has made some of the best-known images of the wild places of England and Wales. But with the erosion of the land by man, he no longer feels free in the wilds and prefers to make his landscapes from debris found in his back garden."

Zelda Cheatle, who from 1989 represented Blakemore, noted that a British lack of acceptance for the medium as art was still prevalent in the mid-90s; when she offered contemporary photographs at the Art 96 fair in Islington, they were handled roughly and the only one she sold was a Blakemore, for £175.

For his landscapes, Blakemore worked in black-and-white using a large-format 4x5 camera (in 1990 he was reported as using a British Micro Precision Products Ltd model manufactured between 1941 and 1982) and applied the Zone System and much darkroom work to his prints.

Popular Photography records that a technique he used for capturing the feeling of motion in his landscapes involved making multiple exposures, superimposing in-camera, "one or more windswept images over one in which no motion is evident. This permits him maximum control of movement to imply energy."

He has also made still life imagery in his home studio, including a series on tulips.

Jan Fyfe, acknowledging the influence of his work on hers, notes that "Blakemore’s practice is built around the intimacy found within the sustained exploration of small areas and, for him, the garden is a contained and private landscape, a space between “nature” and culture," and quotes his own statement that his work is "based on familiarity [and] on the prolonged and intensive scrutiny of a subject […] or particular location’ and he utilized methods of double exposure as a process of mapping time."

He has been the recipient of Arts Council awards, a British Council Travelling Exhibition and in 1992 won the Fox Talbot Award for Photography.

On 30 September 1992, in the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, Blakemore was presented by Yousuf Karsh with the UK's then most valuable award, the $10,000 Fox Talbot Prize.

The judges commented: "This is the most mature work among the entries. Every single speck on his pictures is there on purpose. There is mystery to it. It's not something that gives itself up to you instantly. It's beautiful".

He was nominated for the award by Fay Godwin who explained:

He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1998.

Simon James, in reviewing John Blakemore's Black and White Photography Workshop in 2005 describes its author as... "...one of those rare individuals in British photography whose work is known, and appreciated, across the spectrum of the craft. Whether you talk to advertising or editorial photographers, artists or darkroom specialists, his reputation is held in equal respect. One of the strengths of his imagery lies in its accessibility. It is work which someone entirely new to photography can approach and enjoy, yet it retains a multi-layered sophistication of a kind normally detached from the popular end of photographic practice..."

...and notes his "sense of irony" in "going into print with his definitive treatise on black and white photography at the very point when the majority of the photographic world accelerates towards a digital future. Indeed, he alludes to this in both introduction and conclusion."