… there are jewels
To gather, but with the eye
Only, a hill lights up
Suddenly, a field trembles
With colour and goes out
In its turn, in one day
You can witness the extent
Of the spectrum and grow rich with looking (The Small Window, RS Thomas)

English photographer John Blakemore wrote the above poem into one of his handmade photography books—personal, tactile creations for his images not intended for exhibition. RS Thomas, the Welsh poet who penned The Small Window, was known for wandering the hills of Wales as Blakemore had once done when he lived in Wales near the Mawddach Estuary; Blakemore later returned to document those jewels on film. The poem was an apt choice, for it highlights one of Blakemore’s most astonishing talents—he is ceaselessly attuned to the deep pleasure of seeing, in ways that many of us do not take time for or have forgotten how to do. As he explained in an email:

“I have always distrusted the apparent ease of photography. The lift of the camera, the fraction of a second, with no necessity of relationship between photographer and subject. So the experience of looking intently, experiencing subject is significant for me. One can't photograph experience, but one can take the experience of looking back to the act of photographing. Similarly working on the same subject for long periods deepens experience. I feel that to photograph a place, a motif, briefly is to see the expected. We inevitably begin with preconceptions of the images we can make; to continue to photograph is to develop ideas, to extend the possible. Hence the process of prolonged looking.”

Amazingly, tulips were an accidental subject for Blakemore. When he was studying critical theory and therefore forced to write a lot, he suffered occasional writer’s block sitting at the kitchen table where he wrote. In order to break the stagnation, Blakemore brought out his camera, curious to see what he could discover by photographing his workspace. Happily, there was a bowl of tulips on the table, and a long-standing photographic love affair was born.

TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL