documentary series Area in Transition at the Coventry College of Art, but after receiving a 1974 grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain he concentrated on his landscapes in the north-west of Scotland, North Wales and Derbyshire; he received further bursaries from the Arts Council in 1976 and 1979. For his landscapes, Blakemore worked in black-and-white using a large-format 4x5 camera (in 1990 he was reported as using a British Micro Precision Products Ltd model manufactured between 1941 and 1982) and applied the Zone System and much darkroom work to his prints. Popular Photography records that a technique he used for capturing the feeling of motion in his landscapes involved making multiple exposures, superimposing in-camera, "one or more windswept images over one in which no motion is evident. This permits him maximum control of movement to imply energy." He has also made still life imagery in his home studio, including a series on tulips. Jan Fyfe, acknowledging the influence of his work on hers, notes that "Blakemore’s practice is built around the intimacy found within the sustained exploration of small areas and, for him, the garden is a contained and private landscape, a space between “nature” and culture," and quotes his own statement that his work is "based on familiarity [and] on the prolonged and intensive scrutiny of a subject […] or particular location’ and he utilized methods of double exposure as a process of mapping time." Reception Among the earliest reviews of Blakemore's work was Merete Bates' in The Guardian of 13 October 1975, critiquing his show in Impressions Gallery held alongside photojournalism by Bert Hardy; John Blakemore concentrates on landscape. His photographs are small, personal, intense, and search out poetic images that have particularly human relevance. Wounds of Trees for example, focus on bark goudged and scarred like flesh, on branches gnarled and knotted like rheumatism, on trees bare and dying among surrounding foliage. In Metamorphoses, water freezes and thaws. Even in the more traditional seascape of sunrise over Mawdach Estuary, Blakemore conveys a peculiar, still, sharp melancholy. His failure, if any, does not arise from lack of visison, but from insufficiently pursued images. There is an overall darkness in the prints that almost obscures the content. And even Wounds of Trees could be more decisively, dramatically shot. Bryn Campbell, reviewing the Creative Camera International Year Book 1976, notes of the portfolio of eleven pictures by Blakemore