John Blakemore

John Blakemore is an acclaimed, often revered British photographer, based in Derbyshire, who has worked in documentary, landscape and still-life photography since the 1960s. He was born in Coventry and discovered photography during National Service with the RAF in Tripoli in the 1950s and is self-taught.

 He began his career photographing the people of Coventry and its post-war reconstruction, working first for the Black Star Photo Agency and then moved on to work in a variety of studios. In the early 1970s he became a lecturer at Derby College of Art and later became Emeritus Professor of Photography at the University of Derby where he taught from 1970 to 2001. He also ran workshops at The Photographers' Place in Derbyshire in the 1980s. He developed his own version of the Zone System, pioneered multiple negative exposure techniques and became a specialist in the field of processing and printing. He worked on various still life and collage from the 1980s onwards, including a series entitled Tulipa. His now works with small colour prints to make one-off artist’s books.

I first visited Wales in 1968 when I spent the winter in Barmouth. The Welsh landscape was different to any I had previously known […] and from the experience of that winter all my subsequent landscape work, whether done in Wales or not, has grown. The Wales of my photographs, my Wales, is narrowly defined, a stretch of beach, a wooded hillside, a short length of river valley, areas which speak to me and which I visit again and again; to learn to see, to allow the possibility of communion, of understanding. My photography is built around this ritual of intimacy.

What I try to evoke is the dynamism of landscape, its spiritual and physical energy, its fundamental mystery.

taken from Spirit of Place / Naws y Lle, Welsh Arts Council, 1979