John Blakemore writes that “The period after leaving Coventry was a difficult one. I had left both my immediate and my extended family, my community. I had lost my sense of self. I considered myself an outcast.

in London I worked at various jobs, finally managing a portrait studio in Oxford Street before moving to Derby in 1970 to teach. It was a period of stagnation in my personal practice. I saw teaching as a way out of commercial photography which I had decided I no longer wished to pursue.

I had no idea of what my next photographs might be.

The invitation to join a group of students in an exhibition made new work essential. But what to photograph?

I had spent the winter of 1968 in Wales, in a flat overlooking the Mawddach Estuary. The landscape fascinated me, so different from the landscapes of the Midlands I had grown up with. I walked and wrote but did not photograph, I was not a landscape photographer, had never considered the landscape as a possible area of activity. However, I no longer wanted to work with people and it was to the Mawddach I returned when the imperative to make new work asserted

itself.

I had ideas of the photographs I wanted to make. Not the picturesque, the wide landscape, but details which implied the forces which shaped the landscape.

In 1968, in response to the Welsh landscape, I had written:

... A land of paradox, harsh lunar landscapes, running with gurgling water and supporting everywhere a riotous life. From the very rocks trees thrust upwards, life at its most tenacious, gripping convulsively at the unyielding rock, and raising twisted arms to the unrelenting wind. Limbs grey green with the parasitic growth of moss and lichen which weld tree and rock into one entity. Trees grey and armoured as the rock, wood metamorphosed into rock by the struggle for life, and over all a sky as subtle and ever changing as the landscape itself.

To be alone in the landscape was a release, a return to the pleasures and pursuits of my childhood which had been lost to me.

Wounds of Trees was my first landscape sequence developing my sense of the metaphoric potential of the photograph.

Metamorphosis and All Flows marked my discovery of the Derbyshire landscape, and confirmed my concern with exploring landscape as a manifestation of energy. My practice was built around a ritual of intimacy, around the sustained exploration of small areas which in some way spoke to me, which I could visit again and again, to learn to see, to know.

The exploration of landscape as energy, of the photograph as metaphor continued to fascinate me, in 1992 I wrote: The camera produces an intense depiction of an external reality, but it also transforms what it 'sees', moves between fact and fiction. I seek to make images which function both as fact and as metaphor, reflecting both the external world and my inner response to and connection with it.

...This exploration culminated in the exhibition Lila and in the Wind Series I sequence. The Hindu term lila embodies ideas of both spiritual and physical energy, the universe as dance or play. Lila explored light, water, wind, plant growth and in the final sequence sought to show energy both as a creative and a destructive force.” (John Blakemore, Photographs 1955-2010, Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011 (p50))