The Archive of John Blakemore (b. 1936)

John Blakemore, Emeritus Professor of Photography at the University of Derby, is a world-renowned artist/photographer whose work encompassing a wealth of aspects from landscape and portraits to superb printmaking. He is perhaps most known for his outstandingly beautiful still-life studies, portrayed in major retrospective exhibitions and books. The archive includes exhibition prints, smaller reference prints, hand-made books, notebooks, and preparatory works for publications, writings, letters, reviews and exhibition catalogues, spanning Blakemore’s career from his first photographs made in Libya in 1956 through to large colour works exhibited in 2002. It represents not only the final photographs exhibited or published, but also allows for a comparative study of the artist’s development, especially through the inclusion of some pairs of prints made from the same negative at a distance of several years, and the rich selection of hand-made books beginning with his first, made in 1984, and others made more recently.