John Blakemore

John Blakemore is a master photographer and printer from Great Britain, who has been practicing his art since 1956. Renowned for his richly detailed and nuanced landscapes and still-lifes, he has influenced generations of photographers through his classes at the University of Derby as well as countless workshops. Students and fellow photographers often acknowledge that Blakemore has "enriched their lives beyond compare." 

http://www.lensculture.com/blakemore.html

John Blakemore wasn’t a photographer from childhood, being more obsessed with drawing wildlife. His passion for photography was inspired when his mother sent him an issue of Picture Post when he was in Africa when serving in the RAF as a nurse.


His landscape photography was always about ideas about place rather than just the place itself. He wanted to capture a sense of the forces that shape the landscape at large. The results are photographs that have a raw power with a presentation that can look uncomposed to the hurried eye but is actually exquisitely balanced.

http://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2011/03/master-photographer-john-blakemore/#/

"At the conclusion of any extended piece of work, one inevitably questions the results. What have I learned during this journey? What has this intense period of activity been about?"

"The tulip journey, then was ultimately a visual journey, an investigation and discovery of visual possibilities. The tulip became an object of attention and fascination. It became both text and pretext for an activity of picture-making. The photographs are not finally, or not primarily, about tulips: they contain tulips. To say this is not to diminish the role of the tulip. Had the vase of flowers on the table when I made the first tentative exposures exploring the space of my kitchen been, let’s say daffodils, then the journey, if it had ever begun, would in all probability have been shorter."

"The daffodil, although it is a delightful flower, exhibits a stubborn rigidity of form; it lives and dies at attention. The tulip, however, is a flower of constant metamorphosis; it stretches towards the light and gestures to occupy the space."

"I spent much time just contemplating the flowers, with the camera far from my thoughts. I delighted in the tulips’ voluptuous presence. Such periods of contemplation, of visual pleasure, are always a necessary part of my work process. It is a deepening of my experience of, and of my relationship to, my subject."

"One cannot photograph experience, but to have lived it can change and develop habitual ways of seeing and of knowing."

 

 

http://www.lensculture.com/blakemore.html