TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Thomas, the protagonist in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), is probably the most famous photographer as character in film history. This fame is not only due to his first name, a direct reference to the incredulous disciple of the New Testament. It also has to do with the fact that the film shows him at one and the same time as an artist and as a technician whose relations with the world are variously, powerfully and constantly mediated: through his camera, of course, but also through the instruments and stages which make it possible for him to invent or re-invent images in his studio, depicted in more than one sense as a laboratory for investigating the real. Indeed Antonioni’s film plunges its character to a dizzying degree into a series of actions which function as essential steps in making a photographic image: taking the shot, developing it and printing it, but also and above all blowing it up and reframing it. While Thomas is busy unfolding, spatialising and reconstructing the nodal event of the narrative on the walls of his studio, in a vast speculative scenography, Antonioni’s direction employs pans, shot-reverse shots, sound and editing to juxtapose the irreconcilable points of view of the photographer and his camera, with as a horizon a reality which will remain stubbornly opaque.