Artist research – John Blakemore – Light and Shadow.

John Blakemore.

 

John Blakemore is a English photographer who has worked in documentary, still life, landscape, and hand made books. He was born July 15th in 1936.

 

He has been the holder of Arts Council awards, a British Council Travelling Exhibition and in 1992, he won the Fox Talbot Award for Photography.

 

John Blakemore began with an ambition to be a photojournalist in which, a trip to London resulted in a series of commissions for the “Black Star” agency.

He worked in a series of portrait and general studios from the late 1950s to 1970s all the while, his personal documentary practice continued alongside, resulting in three large exhibitions.

 

He began to teach for full-time, in 1970 is what marked the beginning of his landscape work, which established him as a “known” photographer.

“He is a master photographer and printer, and he has been practicing his art since 1956.”

 

 

 

John Blakemore is known for his detailed  landscapes and still-lifes.

 

“In late 1970, he began to explore the Peak District, looking for areas where he might continue his landscape work. The first site of interest that he found was a small stream, Linch Clough in North Derbyshire. It became the focus of his work and he photographed there from 1971 – 1976.”

 

He was also developing his “Wounds of trees” work.

 

Linch Clough became the source of his second sequence “Metamorphosis” and later “All Flows”

 

He found that working in nature, created a lot of new things to focus his photography on, such as, movement, constant change, variations in flow – turbulent after rain, slow in time of drought became things to consider.

One of his stratergies that he believed was a good place to start when he finally chooses an area to photograph,  was to sit with his eyes closed. And after he opened his eyes. He found that this both allowed him to “become attuned to the space and to “see” with greater intensity.”

Something that i find fascinating in John Blakemores work, is in fact the detail that the audience can see and I believe that this is helped with the black and white changes in the images, simply showing the strong light and shadow in the image. However, he doesnt always work in black and white, he sometimes provides colour which is  something rare to find in light and shadowed images.

 

He also works in nature, landscapes, which is what truly caught my eye as i find this very inspiring, simply looking at the space around us, moving from place to place and looking for the attention to detail, whether that is in leafs, trees, water etc. This is something I wanted to take away from his work, the idea that looking and realising is a great thing within photography.

These are my images rather inspired by John Blakemore, I wanted to show the colour and the black and whites as I experimented with both.

 

More of my photos: