John Blakemore, who has died aged 88, preferred to be thought of as a picture-maker rather than a photographer, and described his craft as the transformation of subject to idea to image. To this end, he became a consummate master of monochrome photography, insisting that “the exploration and control of process is fundamental in any medium”. On a variety of photographic papers and with the use of selenium and gold toners, he created prints of extraordinary tonal range and beauty. His prints moved from the living dark of deep shadow, as in his early series Metamorphoses (1971-74) and Spirit of Place (1970-81), to the ephemeral glowing whites of his Thistles and Wind series (1980-2010).
John’s work has been widely exhibited both in the UK and internationally; books, which include John Blakemore (1977), Inscape (1991), The Stilled Gaze (1994) and John Blakemore Photographs 1955-2010 (2011) provide examples and commentaries on his work. In 1992, he won the prestigious Fox Talbot award for photography and in 1998 he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
He began creating the photographic work that brought him recognition in the 1970s, while teaching at Derby Lonsdale College (now Derby University). He described himself as a photographer in the landscape, as distinct from a photographer of the landscape; his photographs are not topographical and rarely depict the open view. He worked with deliberately limited equipment, in places with which he felt a connection and to which he returned again and again.
Before beginning to photograph, he would prepare himself with a ritual of acclimatisation, allowing himself to feel the contact with the ground, hear the myriad sounds of the landscape, and experience the movements of the air. Its purpose was two-fold: to attune to the place, and to disperse any preconceptions as to what images might be made. The camera may have been pointed at wood, rock, trees, ice or flowing water, but the images are a brooding meditation through which John sought to convey the spiritual sense of place and the underlying forces and energies that shape the landscape.
This exploration culminated in a second Wind series of photographs and the exhibition Lila at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1980. John noted: “Lila is a Hindu term embodying ideas of both spiritual and physical energy, of the universe at dance or play.” But, after about 10 years, John felt he could no longer justify a practice that represented the landscape as Edenic. He turned increasingly to creating still life in the studio.
Nevertheless, he accepted a commission from CPRE (what was then the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and is now known as the Countryside Charity), to photograph at Fulbeck in Lincolnshire. Unusually, he made photographs of the wider, open landscape and also negotiated permission to include signs of the protest against the establishment of a dumping site for nuclear waste in the area. This last work in the landscape he titled England’s Glory (1984).
John described the creation of still life as akin to solving a jigsaw puzzle without a guiding picture, and this work became a prolonged exploration of several themes. His still-life photographs are always intense observations – his pampas grass images have all the precision of engineering drawings – while at the same time being metaphors for his inner responses, conveying by turns a brooding melancholy and an airy lightness, and the mysteries of metamorphosis, decay and regeneration.
Preoccupations with the underlying forces that he explored in his earlier landscape work are still present, though translated into fictional constructions using all manner of material brought into his studio space. He worked with the same limited equipment (a 5×4 camera and a single lens) and window light directed with reflectors. Best known from this period is an extended exploration that began when his attention fell on a photograph of a vase of tulips on his kitchen table.
Two significant exhibitions at the Zelda Cheatle Gallery in London marked this shift in practice: Inscape (1991) included work made in the landscape as well as in the studio; but in The Stilled Gaze (1994), John’s attention had moved entirely into the domestic space.
The final phase of his work saw him confining his practice to his garden and the exploration of the play of light in his living room. Although he still had a darkroom and continued to produce prints, he forsook his MPP plate camera with its single Symmar lens for an aged but reliable Nikkormat. He photographed in colour and took his films to be processed and printed locally in Derby. He edited (even cut up) and sequenced the resulting prints, and devoted himself to creating handmade books.
John was born in Coventry, one of the two sons of Charles Blakemore, a barber, and his wife, Norah, and was evacuated to Fenny Compton in Warwickshire during his wartime childhood. His interest in photography was inspired when he saw images from Edward Steichen’s 1955 New York exhibition The Family of Man in the magazine Picture Post while doing national service as a nurse with the RAF in Libya. He made his first photographs there, and on his return to Britain worked for a time with the Black Star agency in London.
However, his first sustained documentary work was made and exhibited in Coventry, and included Hillfields – an Area in Transition, about the area in which he lived. He joined the staff of Derby Lonsdale College in 1970 and in 1993 was appointed reader in photography at what was by then Derby University; on his retirement in 2001 he was made professor emeritus. A major archive of his work is held at Birmingham Central Library.
In his 2005 book, John Blakemore’s Black and White Photography Workshop, he set out and shared his approach. He was a respected leader of photography workshops, including many at the Photographers Place in the Peak District, at Duckspool in Somerset, at Inversnaid Lodge near Loch Lomond and, even into his 80s, at the Photo Parlour in Nottingham.
Participants found themselves in the presence of a modest and unassuming man who not only shared his skills and insights, but also acknowledged his debt to all those “who made it necessary for me to discover ways of talking about picture making”.
John is survived by his partner, and by two sons from his first marriage, a son and daughter from his second, and a daughter from another long-term relationship.