John Blakemore (15 July 1936 – 14 January 2025) was an English photographer who worked in documentary, landscape, still life and created hand made books.
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,[3] an experience that confirmed his pacifism.
[2] He ordered a Kodak Retina IIc from Aden, and started photographing his surroundings in North Africa and learned the basics in the darkroom of the military camp.
[5] 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.
[8] 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";[9] 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 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".
[2]In 1977, Colin Thomas founded a community project, Aware Photographic Arts, based in Liverpool's Lark Lane, where John Blakemore and others conducted workshops for thousands of disadvantaged participants from young children and unemployed adults to pensioners and exhibited the work in supermarkets and old people's homes, libraries and at festivals.
[15] In 1990 he also gave printing demonstrations and workshops to members of the RPS in his own darkroom at 2 Ferrestone Road, Hornsey,[16] and in 1992 presented Master classes at Duckspool Photographers, Somerset, with Paul Hill, Fay Godwin, Martin Parr, Eamonn McCabe, Peter Goldfield, Tom Cooper, Brian Griffin, Roger Mayne, and Sue Davies.
[19]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 Markéta Luskačová, 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.
[20]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.
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.
[8]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.
"[25] Harry Nankin[26] 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”.