For several years I felt that his work had not been receiving proper recognition. The only publication of his work was a 1977 Arts Council book of his early landscapes. Mainstream publishers were too short-sighted to seize the opportunity, but last year the tiny unfunded gallery, Zelda Cheatle, with huge vision, published a stunning collection of his work, entitled Inscape, sumptuously printed by Jackson Wilson. A major retrospective of John's work was launched in Derby, where he teaches, and is touring the country. The successive themes in John's work are well represented, and the final work submitted for this Prize explores the timeless metaphysical themes of life and death with poetic resonance, great beauty and awesome assurance. Zelda Cheatle, who from 1989 represented Blakemore, noted that a British lack of acceptance for the medium as art was still prevalent in the mid-90s; when she offered contemporary photographs at the Art 96 fair in Islington, they were handled roughly and the only one she sold was a Blakemore, for £175. Simon James, in reviewing John Blakemore's Black and White Photography Workshop in 2005 describes its author as... ...one of those rare individuals in British photography whose work is known, and appreciated, across the spectrum of the craft. Whether you talk to advertising or editorial photographers, artists or darkroom specialists, his reputation is held in equal respect. One of the strengths of his imagery lies in its accessibility. It is work which someone entirely new to photography can approach and enjoy, yet it retains a multi-layered sophistication of a kind normally detached from the popular end of photographic practice... ...and notes his "sense of irony" in "going into print with his definitive treatise on black and white photography at the very point when the majority of the photographic world accelerates towards a digital future. Indeed, he alludes to this in both introduction and conclusion." Harry Nankin places Blakemore amongst those, including "Walter Chappell, William Clift, Wynn Bullock, Frederick Sommer, Sally Mann in the United States; [...] Thomas Joshua Cooper in the UK; and John Cato and Ian Lobb in Australia," who from the mid-1960s used landscape to, in Minor White's words, "express their feelings of being at one with nature”. Educator In the early 1970s Blakemore joined his friend Richard Sadler as a lecturer at Derby College of Art under Bill Gaskins. He was influential on the younger generation who, as Eamonn