Just received the sad news that my old friend and teaching colleague, the legendary John Blakemore died last night after a short illness. He had been taken into hospital in Derby over Christmas.
Born in Coventry in 1936, he was probably best known for his landscape work, but he had worked in many areas of the medium and was an inspirational teacher, mostly at Derby University. His work has been exhibited all over the world and he has had several acclaimed books published. He has been the recipient of Arts Council awards, a British Council Travelling Exhibition and in 1992 won the Fox Talbot Award for Photography. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1998.
There is so so much more I could say about JB, but that will come later. For now, our thoughts are with Rosalind, his stalwart partner, and his extended family and close friends.
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John along with Martin Roberts were our two main teachers at Derby 78 to 81. He taught us how to print and we became a little obsessive about making Dr.Beers developer from the base chemicals and purchasing bulk packs of Agfa Record Rapid from Paris. I last met John about 4 years ago and he still had his gentle sense of humour joking about becoming a professor without any o levels.
I was lucky enough to attend one of John's silverprint workshops sometime in 2018, through the Make it Easy Lab in Nottingham. I had travelled to Birmingham library earlier that year to examine prints from his "Wind" and "Lila" series from the archives. Both were preparations for my practice-based PhD in photography at the University of Brighton, which at that point focussed on landscape as a site of national identity. Over the course of six years the focus shifted into an interest in plant intelligence, however, I later returned to John's "Wind" series as inspiration for my project "Perceiving Phytochrome". In a sense he bracketted my PhD journey and as coincidence would have it, his death has also coincided with my thesis submission. In the same year that I met him I also invested in one of his prints from his "Lila" series, which has since hung in my living room. He remains a great inspiration to me not just as an exceptional photographer, but also as a gentle and supportive educator. He will be sorely missed.