My friend John Nesbitt, who has died aged 77, was one of a small group who designed and built large-format cameras. These cameras slowed down the photographic process and enabled photographers to reconsider and deepen their own practice – in John’s case, his enduring engagement with and understanding of the Welsh landscape, evident in Mutatis Mutandis at the Ffotogallery, Cardiff in 1987. In this exhibition John used multiple exposures on 10 x 8in negatives to explore the ways natural landscape changes with the effects of light, atmosphere and different weathers. The resulting images retain a profoundly haunting quality.
John was born in Carlisle, to Margaret (nee Shadwick) and Emmanuel, known as “Manny”. A couple of years later the family moved to Sunderland, where Manny worked as a buyer for a building firm. John attended Southmoor technical school, Sunderland, where he developed his interest in art, as well as useful skills in metalwork and woodwork. At 16 he left school and went to Sunderland Art School, then in 1964 to Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, which is where I first met him.
After graduating in 1967, John initially focused on still life and landscape painting, supported by occasional teaching and work in forestry. He married Jan Allen in 1968 and, following the birth of their two sons, Piers and Tom, the family moved in 1971 to mid-Wales, where John turned to photography using a range of camera formats. John and Jan separated in the mid-70s.
Dissatisfied with the limitations of the second-hand 5x4 MPP camera, in 1983 he decided to design and make his own camera, based on the classic cameras made by Gandolfi and Deardorff. Working in a disused blacksmith’s workshop attached to his home in Llanidloes, he built his prototype, initially using an old mahogany table-top from a skip for its body. Subsequently, John ran large-format camera workshops that proved so popular that he teamed up with a fellow photographer, Pete Davis, to run them on a regular basis; they also resulted in orders for around 150 handmade cameras.
In 1985 John’s work featured in a survey of British photography, Image and Exploration: Some Directions in British Photography, 1980-85, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. A complete portfolio titled The Old Metal Mines of Mid-Wales was purchased by the National Library of Wales in 1995, and in that year John exhibited another landscape portfolio, Whispers, at the Recontres Photographiques en Bretagne, at Galerie Le Lieu in Lorient, on the southern coast of Brittany. In 1996 John held a retrospective of his work at Studio 13, Llanidloes, and began funded work on a series of photographs about the Highland Clearances, under the title The Year of the Burnings.
John married his second wife, Michelle Audurea, in 1991, and six years later they moved to an old farmhouse in the Vendée, western France, which John refurbished. Although he continued to take photographs and exhibit his work, he no longer made cameras. He returned to an earlier passion for Celtic music and began playing the bagpipes he had bought in an antiques shop in Bath in 1966.
He is survived by Michelle, his sons, Piers and Tom, two grandchildren, and his elder brother, George, and two sisters, June (his twin) and Kathleen.
