John Blakemore

Since 2010 a large part of Blakemore's archive has been held at the Library of Birmingham, in particular:

Simon James, in reviewing John Blakemore's Black and White Photography Workshop in 2005 describes its author as...

Blakemore in 2001 became Emeritus Professor of Photography at the University of Derby.

He has been the recipient of Arts Council awards, a British Council Travelling Exhibition and in 1992 won the Fox Talbot Award for Photography. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1998.

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:

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."

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;

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.

From 1985 he was one of the contributors, with Peter Turner, Fay Godwin and Lewis Baltz, to workshops at The Photographer's Place in Derby, and in 1991 with Godwin, Derry Brabbs and Thomas Joshua Cooper at Inversnaid Lodge near Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. In 1990 he also gave printing demonstrations and workshops to members of the RPS in his own darkroom at 2 Ferrestone Road, Hornsey, 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. Blakemore, in his eighties, was still conducting printing workshops, at The Photo Parlour, Nottingham, in 2019.

In 1978 Blakemore was featured with Ernst Haas in Bryn Campbell's Exploring Photography III: The Landscape, broadcast on BBC-2 England.

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 peoples homes, libraries and at festivals. Blakemore, twenty years after its foundation wrote that Aware; "not only understands and utilises the democracy of the image, but lives in a democracy based on access for all".

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;

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;

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.

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;

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”.

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

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.

John Blakemore (born 1936), is an English photographer who has worked in documentary, landscape, still life and hand made books. He taught the medium full time from 1970.

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.