John Blakemore 1938-2025

A LONG EXPOSURE or Two Marlboro Reds at f/90 

John Blakemore talks to Benedict Brain  about the evolution of his image-making over the last fifty years 

(first published in Amateur Photographer magazine in 2006 - (thanks to Tom Hill for the exposure time anecdote))

The window sill was filled with old prisms and fragments of glass. In the low, raking autumn light, they create a spectacle of spectral bursts scattering magical rainbows around the room. I’m in Derby, at the home of my old tutor, John Blakemore, interviewing him for a magazine article, when he suddenly leaps to his feet, grabs an old Nikon and enthusiastically takes pictures of the flickering rays as they dance on the fireplace behind me. The fleeting moment passes, and we resume our conversation.

Revered as one of Britain’s most respected photographers, printers and teachers of photography, John’s landscape and still-life images are widely collected, exhibited and published. His recent book, “John Blakemore’s Black and White Workshop,” is an insightful and inspirational resource, and his teachings at the University of Derbyshire have inspired countless students, myself included.

Born in 1936, John first became intrigued by photography while doing national service in North Africa. “I was sent a copy of Picture Post,” he says. “In it were selected photographs from ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition. I thought if one could drop a copy of the exhibition catalogue onto the desk of every world leader, then surely the world would become a better place because they would realise the errors of their ways. I decided at that point that I would become a photographer.”

On returning home, John touted his portfolio around London. “I had no idea how picture agencies were organised, so I went to them all. In most cases, my interviews lasted about twenty seconds. I went to Black Star, and they said, ‘You can’t print, but you’ve got a good eye.’” Returning to Coventry, he was surprised to receive his first assignment the following morning and spent the next 18 months working for the agency.

“I soon realised I didn’t have the freelance temperament. Even then, I knew that I wanted to work on projects for long periods, so I got a job in a Coventry portrait studio.” This allowed John to connect with the local community and to work on personal documentary projects. His first exhibition was in Coventry in 1964, and he continued with this work into the late 1960s, by which time he had lost his belief in the ability of photography to change things. “I stopped doing any documentary photography,” he says. “I had a crisis in my personal life and also in my photography.”

It was a year before he made another photograph, and after finding solace in the Welsh landscape, he tentatively started working again, this time in the landscape. “It was partly personal crisis, partly a loss of faith in the documentary image as a catalyst of change, and partly the experience of Wales,” he explains. “I was interested in notions of the idea of the photograph as a metaphor, and I began a series of photographic sequences.”

“The first sequence was titled ‘Wounds of Trees,’” he continues. “The incisions in the bark implied a wounding; I made a connection between my own emotional state and the photographs I was making. This was the first time I had made a piece of work where there was the idea of the metaphor. Where I was expressing something about my feelings. I was making photographs which were of something, but which became about something else.”

John continued to photograph the landscape for the following 11 years. “Through details and the work in the stream, I clarified ideas about the landscape as energy, which became the fundamental idea of my work,” he says.

“The idea of energy in the landscape was obviously manifest in water, but I began thinking of ways in which I could discover that in the wider landscape, and so I began photographing the wind. The wind is invisible and the photograph is concerned with representing ‘surface.’ One is not photographing the wind but the process of the wind. The way I found to do this was by using multiple exposure. Some images have 48 exposures and it could take up to an hour to expose one negative.”

“When I first photographed the wind, I thought all I have to do is go in the landscape when it is windy, find a suitable spot, set up my camera and give a long exposure. When I did this, the wind would stop blowing. So I began working with multiple exposures, and by doing that I could break my base exposure into increments and build up a web of implied movement.”

After 11 years, John lost faith in the landscape image. “I began to feel that I could no longer justify my landscapes when my species was doing its best to destroy it. But making images is necessary to me, so I began working with still life.”

The photograph of the single leaf is typical of John’s early still-life work. “I wanted to make pictures which were simple, and so I returned to the basic nature of photography, of intense scrutiny and description. I found the idea of still life difficult to come to terms with. But it was also something that I enjoyed and I carried on; the work quickly became more complex.”

In 1985, John started a film studies course. As a distraction from the intense writing that it involved, he started making pictures. “I began photographing the space in which I wrote, and purely by chance, there was a bowl of tulips on the table. This became the central motif of my work for the next nine years.”

“Photographing tulips allowed me to work through the possibilities of still life. Although the set-ups contained tulips, they weren’t about tulips—they were about the process of picture-making which the tulips facilitated. The tulip work allowed me to explore notions of the still life by making reference to a tradition that pre-dates the photograph. I was looking at paintings which allowed me to make different types of still life.”

John’s work is rich on many levels, and while it has evolved through several genres, one element that remains constant throughout is his masterful control of the black-and-white image and his sensitive use of tone. “Since the mid-70s, the exploration of tonality has been significant to me. I try to work in the darkroom simply; I have no gadgets. One can learn to make a black-and-white print in an afternoon and then spend the rest of one’s life refining the process. The zone system was significant to me, not because of the pretend precision in which the term is often talked about, but because of the understanding of tonality that it gives one.”

John is generally thought of as a photographer working solely in black and white, but he has worked in colour since the mid-sixties. “I always wanted it to be a ‘private practice,’” he says. “So it was something which I did for myself; I didn’t show any colour work until the late nineties. I see the colour work as very different. I have never learnt to colour print, and so it is more about the ‘moment of seeing,’ and I have en-prints made at a local lab.”

“I didn’t want my colour prints left in a packet. I like work to be seen, thought through and organised, so the hand-made book has become an alternative to the exhibition wall. I am fascinated by the idea of making photographs, which become about light; when we make a photograph, we see light but only as mediated by objects. A lot of my colour work is around this theme and also about exploring my own domestic space, so I have been photographing the light refracted by prisms on my walls. They are generally one-offs, and I make them purely for my own amusement.”

//ends//


Further info and resources:

Seduced by Light - The Hyman Collection (2023)

https://hymancollection.org/video/5-john-blakemore-seduced-by-light-long-version/

SOURCE Photographic Review at the Birmingham Central Library (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzWJYQAxOec



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