In Antonioni’s 1966 film ‘Blow Up’, a nameless character played by David Hemmings takes a series of spontaneous and candid photos of a lover’s tryst in Maryon Park, London. The persistence of the female lover in attempting to secure the pictures invests them with added significance, and only later does the photographer come to realise he has unwittingly captured something of an altogether different meaning. Successive enlargements are taken from the negatives and meditated upon, culminating in the revelation of a disturbing sequence of peripheral events. Concrete evidence seems to confirm the assumptions the photographer has made, but even then his attempt to communicate them to a colleague is met with disinterest and fails.

I hope to track the evolution of an obsession with mediated death which from the outset is bound to result in further obfuscation and historical revisionism, employing highly tenuous abstractions and inferring potentially dubious conclusions. In doing so, we will begin with some of the film’s central themes, using them as springboards for casual abuse of the right to digress, and as stepping stones on which to tread gingerly over the hazardous semantic lake of a wider investigation into the effect that incessantly mediated reality has on the viewer.

“Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.” (Susan Sontag)

In general, ‘Blow Up’ highlights the failure to isolate truth and extract meaning in an environment – London in the “swinging sixties” / anywhere – where mass media and technological advance increase individual empowerment but consequently erode formerly stable certainties. There is an ephemerality inherent in people’s relationships to each other and to objects they encounter. (1) The photographer is the filter through which the viewer is forced to identify and confront their own beliefs about the position of the observer.

Hemmings’ character is never explicitly named - referred to from here on as Blue 439 (his radio tag) – an unfulfilled, consuming and objectifying voyeur; part of but equally excluded from “the scene” in his role as photographer, helping to create it and simultaneously document it for posterity. His conscious framing of subject matter for others to interpret leads him to confidently assert that he is “free”, a statement immediately undermined when his agent points to a vagrant in one of his pictures and says: “What, like he is?”. In constant anticipation of capturing an essential moment, he travels at speed around the city in search of a situation to fire his imagination; finding it at Maryon Park, he then embarks on a pursuit of the transitory within the serial images of the scenario he has captured there. Download Footnotes here

Perambulations through infernal media by Guy Veale

“We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality.” (M.Antonioni)