This is the text for John Blakemore. Towards the Light, an illustrated tribute by James Hyman delivered at the special event celebrating the life and work of John Blakemore at the Derby Museums/Museum of Making, 16 April 2025.
John Blakemore was one of the greatest British photographers of the last half century. He was acclaimed as a sublime landscape photographer; a maker of exquisite still-lives and as the creator of beautiful artist's books. And, as the audience here tonight demonstrates, he was also an influential, charismatic and much-loved teacher.
Born in Coventry in 1936, his earliest photographs made in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of the exhibition and catalogue, The Family of Man, reveal a powerful documentary photographer. They include his first photographs made during his military service in Tripoli and, most notably, a powerful series showing the inner-city area of Hillfields, in Coventry where he lived...
… as well as a major show of behind the scenes photographs of a production of West Side Story for which he tok in excess of three hundred photographs… alongside his work in portrait studios in the Midlands and London. But such series, however accomplished and acclaimed, give little indication of the photographer that he would become.
A maquette from the end of the 1960s provides a summation of this period in the moment prior to its rejection.
Blakemore's mature work really began as the 1960s ended. Influenced by personal and professional crises, he completely re-evaluated his approach to art and photography and found a new path. Abandoning any pretence of objectivity, his work would now be an intensely personal and poetic meditation on the forces of nature and the elements. The landscapes that followed were rarely topographic and landmarks or identifying elements were rarely included. Instead they are altogether more personal: meditations, a form of communion. John would comment that whilst the photographs of his friend, Fay Godwin, were about walking through the countryside, his photographs were about sitting in one place and deeply experiencing it. Tellingly he favoured the close-up, rather than the distant view, and throughout his oeuvre there is a sense of the subject being within grasp.
In an unpublished letter to his friend Richard Sadler, dating from this moment, Blakemore writes of his rejection of "Family of Man" style documentary in favour of something more personal:
"My major aim in my future work will be subjective. Communication will be of secondary importance. I feel now that the significance of my work (to myself) is basically religious; in so far that it is an exploration of my sense of the mysterious, of the boundaries of factual knowledge & intuitive experience; in the revelation of the mysterious in apparently simple things. I want my work to be rooted not in the social world of man, but in the non-human, in the world of nature from which man has alienated himself"
Blakemore and the landscape become one. He would meditate before taking a photograph and in a lengthy unpublished essay from the early 1970s he describes in detail a revelatory experience in a wood at night time, an epiphany of "a physical world of shining splendour." He wrote:
"I felt a oneness with nature; I was astounded by its prodigal beauty… I wandered amazed as though seeing everything for the first time… I can readily understand how some people can interpret this experience as communion with the divine. One enters a world where values of everyday life become meaningless & empty; a tree becomes a potent symbol of life."
Tellingly his breakthrough series Wounds of Trees, dates from this moment and is a body of work in which the gashes and cuts on the trunks of tree are a metaphor for physical and psychological scarring. At a difficult moment in his life, these photographs are amongst the darkest tonally and emotionally of his career.
The landscape series that followed, often photographed in Wales, and showcased in early exhibitions, bear similarly portentous titles such as Premonitions.
These works are mood-scapes, the gloom penetrated by sparks of light.
This is most brilliantly captured when he shows the movement of water illuminated by the moon or sun in which the light dances like a constellation of stars.
In other photographs the forms are barely discernible in the darkness and appear to be bathed in the weakest moonlight.
Whilst in the aptly titled series All Flows and Metamorphoses, the light dissolves the subject.
In later series such as Lila, Blakemore conceives of a suite of works, to explore movement and above all the effect of light, replacing the flow of water with the shimmering movement of grass.
This reaches a climax in the Wind series, perhaps his ultimate response to the landscape. All is light and movement with Blakemore, in an analogue age, incredibly combining as many as forty overlapping exposures.
His brilliant, obsessive series, Tulipomania, which preoccupied him for years also displays a combination of simplicity and abundance. Early simple images made in his kitchen are again as much about light and shadow as form and composition… and later works are brilliantly, abundant orchestrations of light and shade.
Such complexity would also contribute to his brilliant, though less well-known, fantastical, tableaux, such as Chimerical Landscapes (1990), Amergen - The Garden in Winter (1991) and Botanical Theatre (2003). In these constructed scenes Blakemore's subjects are again within grasp as he gives a master-class on the zone system and tonal range.
Whilst some photographer sought a master print, a template for future printing for Blakemore a negative was open to varied interpretations in how it might be printed and toned.
This is especially evident in his images of petals, often toned in the darkroom, which are a powerful demonstration of how differently a single negative could be printed. When we visited John, he would place side by side different renderings of the same negative and frequently favour the latest, lightest version. Detail, tonal contrast, volume may have been lost, but he loved the lightness and the graphic quality that he achieved.
In John Blakemore's Black and White Photography Workshop, his magnum opus on a dying art, Blakemore wrote of three R's: Relationship (with subject), Recognition (of the moment to make a photograph), and Realisation (of the intended image as a final print to be shared). But in recognition also of his exploration of a theme and of his beautiful unique artist's books, I would add a fourth R: the Reordering (of multiple images into a sequence) This is particularly evident in his later colour work.
In his later years, a key book for John was Arthur Zajonc's Catching the Light. The Entwined History of Light and Mind, - published in 1993, and in his later teaching and in his artist's books he would frequently include this quote: "What is this invisible thing called light that reveals everything except itself?"
I believe that John's colour photography deserves to be much better known. He held three shows of colour work in his lifetime and his large-scale prints including triptychs bring the concerns of his artist's books onto the gallery wall.
He explores transparency, showing light penetrating windows and a prism, patterns of light through foliage or petals… sometimes straightforward the subjects are often oblique.
Increasingly he liked the peculiarities of photographic seeing. Whilst in his early black and white photographs he looked hard first, using the camera as a tool to capture what he had pre-visualised, in his later colour photographs, he explores the effects achieved by the camera itself, especially when forms are thrown out of focus, and light is rendered in circles or smears. He liked the fact that this form of seeing was unique to the camera lens rather than the human eye.
This journey from dark to light, takes us from the brooding intensity of his early landscapes, brilliantly printed by John, himself, to the more ethereal later colour works, produced in an automated commercial laboratory.
John was not a conventionally religious man, and there was a modesty and a matter-of-factness about how he spoke about photography. And yet it is hard not to read his celebration of the seduction of light or follow his works progression from darkness - actual and emotional - towards the light, without recognising these qualities as a series of meditations: markers, perhaps, on a spiritual journey of enlightenment.
In a secular, materialistic age John achieved transcendence. And in looking at his work we too are elevated. This ability to uplift and inspire others is surely John's greatest achievement.
