John Blakemore - 'Black and White Photography Workshop'

In his book ‘Black and White Photography Workshop’ he talks about the relationship between the photograph and the reality it describes. The choice of subject will reflect a photographer’s personal concerns and interests, what meanings will be read could differ immensely. Blakemore sees the landscape as energy, which changed how he looks at the landscape and responding to it. For him, the relationship is equally with the location and the process.

            “A landscape, for example, may be chosen to celebrate the unique presence and beauty of a tree, to show depredations of open-cast mining, or to suggest emotional state. The relationship of subject to content will be different in each case, as will the photographic means employed to realize the photographer’s intentions.”

            “In my won landscape work, my photographs grew out of intimacy with place, whether a small stretch of beach, a wooded valley or a tiny stream. These were areas which spoke to me in some way, and that I visited and revisited.  – My intention, however, was not to make images that were about a particular place, but through familiarity to recognize those elements of place that alluded to the larger forces that shape the total landscape”

 Blakemore, J (2008). Black and White photography Workshop. Cincinnati: A David & Charles Book. P11-13
Blakemore, J., Comino-James, J., & Fletcher, J. (2011). 
John Blakemore: photographs 1955-2010. Stockport, Dewi Lewis.