Part 5

In the Park

I often find myself asking a question.

‘What film would I live in if I could?’

It is a question that belies my own rather childish need to escape reality. But, if I could live in a piece of film, it would probably be Michelangelo Antonioni’s celebrated swinging cult classic, Blowup (1966). It is more than a little questionable as a choice, but needs must.

Based on Julio Cortázar’s short story published in 1964, Antonioni turned London into a dreamy, make-believe realm that even its characters seem half aware is not real. It is designed as somewhat of a cautionary tale against vacuous cultural indulgence but its warnings are lost me. I would trade my steel and glass, air-space London any day of the week for its swinging opulence in the blink of an eye.

I can imagine standing stock-still watching The Yardbirds miming poorly to Stroll On and laughing at Jeff Beck smashing his guitar into a crackly Vox amplifier. I can see myself wandering between antique shops and haunted parks, or falling madly in love with Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills. I would certainly be much happier than the film’s real protagonist, fashion photographer Thomas (played ruthlessly by David Hemmings), who mournfully disavows his world; desiring an escape from the swinging city. His fictionalising of society behind a lens rendered it too hollow to bear, until fading away at the film’s conclusion.

I sometimes wonder what the narrative of Blowup would have looked like if Thomas was using a Polaroid camera rather than the now iconic Nikon F (chosen because a similar camera was favoured by the troublesome David Bailey who the main character was partly based on). The camera was the first SLR 35mm that had a fully coupled shutter and aperture with an exposure meter. In other words, the camera was the pinnacle of photographic technology at the time of the film’s production.

Antonioni’s film is really about looking – albeit looking and not really seeing – so the type of camera and how it works is essential in addressing what is seen and what is not; as well as the process of blowing up photographs being the ultimate act of the film. The machine forces the main character to question the strangely surreal world around him, as if witnessing its collapse. He tries to distract himself with abstract art, drives in his Rolls-Royce, and stylish women desperate for modelling careers. But, in the end, nothing can stop him from seeing through the falsity of his world.

That narrative in full: Thomas is a photographer of the Bailey/Frank Duffy variety. In order to escape the vapid world of West London glamour, he pays a fleeting visit to a park after perusing in a nearby antiques shop he wishes to buy. He slowly stalks the footsteps of a pair of lovers whom he photographs in the eerily empty park, only to be confronted by the woman, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), who does not want the images developed. 

The film revolves around the back-and-forth journey of these photos before Thomas realises (after developing them) that he has accidentally captured a murder. The body is revealed once blowing up his photos, magnified again and again. He then visits the park several times, first finding the body and then finding it to have disappeared before finally disappearing himself after a watching a group of mimes play tennis in the park’s courts.

The camera is quintessential to the film due to its process of development building structure into the story, with Thomas gradually getting closer to the heart of the mystery before it dissolves into nothing. Blowing up photographs gains metaphorical qualities, zooming into reality until it distorts into the void.

I often think of the voyeuristic pleasure Thomas gets in getting those first few shots of Jane, stood suspiciously with her nameless lover in Maryon Park. The film is more honest about the real, nosy drives of photography than most in the profession would like to admit.

The quiet click of the camera’s mechanism, barely audible on the breeze as Thomas lurks behind the trees and bushes of the strangely ornate park, becomes an expression of surveillance. The film asks: who is really watched, and what is really real? Nothing is what it seems. The question that I find myself asking whenever I watch the film, however, is somewhat different.

Would Thomas have gone down the rabbit hole if he had used a Polaroid camera instead?

I can imagine Jane grabbing the Polaroids and tearing them up straight away, stopping the narrative dead; the mystery never getting further than Thomas’ mild curiosity as to why she had been so nervous. A shameful affair caught on film or a murderous plan unfolding? If it was on a Polaroid we would never know as Jane would have probably been able to stop Thomas looking at the photos in detail, the flash of his camera giving his presence away well before the murder could be concluded.

This is not quite the reason why I have brought Antonioni’s wonderful film up, however. A scene later on suggests something quite fantastical contained within the process of developing photos that, ironically, I feel more accurately conveys a Polaroid’s relationship to photographed space.

Thomas has just given Jane a false reel of 35mm and kept the actual reel containing the photos of her supposed affair. Still curious about what she was hiding, he develops the photographs in the dark room of his extravagant Holland Park studio. He sticks them on the gleaming white walls of the building, still dripping with developing fluid. Gradually, his eye is drawn to something in the grainy black and white images. He magnifies upon two images in particular, creating ever bigger prints of particular sections of the park.

Eventually the scene that was really happening underneath what we as the viewer saw is revealed. In the bushes, a gun is spotted along with the imprint of a man holding it, while under the main tree on the park’s grassy pasture the cold body of another man is revealed behind the analogue grain.

The camera caught something that the eye had missed. Thomas cannot believe it.

He stares, almost aghast at first, then excited at the potential of using the photos in his upcoming photo-book. Mostly, he is uncertain as to whether his own perception has faltered, rendering the whole world unreal (later implied by the film’s ending). But Antonioni does not leave it at that.

In an incredibly subtle moment of sound design, the breeze in the trees from the park drifts into the studio as Thomas scans each photograph with his eyes. He tracks across each image, the scenes gradually magnified as we are transported back to the park or, more unusually, as if the park is actually contained in its entirety within those photographs; so much so that they tell more truth than reality did at the moment Thomas snapped the trigger on his Nikon F.

John Berger once described cameras as ‘boxes for transporting appearances.’ In Antonioni’s film, this includes actual spaces and appearances that our naked eye missed, our blinkered perception failing to acknowledge the real world. The 35mm becomes a machine of greater hindsight and, when the moments it captures are powerful enough (as in Antonioni’s narrative), the spaces begin to filter back into the realm of the viewer; the park trickling into Thomas’ studio.

I do not believe this happens literally. Nor do I generally obtain this unusual feeling when I look at 35mm photographs, even my own. The 35mm shots in Antonioni’s film, however, contain the presence of the park, as unlikely as it seems. I do feel this same sensation when I am holding a Polaroid, however; one of my own especially, but even those taken by dead strangers and ghosts. Their world and its space enter into my own. Real or imagined, the effect is the same.

What this scene does is realise my own viewing experience of Polaroid photos.

When holding a Polaroid, the spaces they show feel almost tangible. This is all the more surprising considering how the colours are far from the reality of whatever place is captured. Colours resemble tissue paper, teetering on existence, thinned and pale compared to the real world. Yet, they are strangely there, as if the Polaroid is closer to catching space as it is seen fleetingly in the mind’s eye.

Perhaps we can feel its sense of space because we have the potential to experience the photograph’s relationship to reality in the moment we create it. It has a relationship to space that is deeply experiential.

With equal ease, I can hold Polaroids by other people and let my imagination fill in the reality around its frame, a patchwork forming in an entirely different space and gaze to my own. It is almost a window onto another world, rather like a fragment of Borges’ 1:1 map that insinuates everything else through the smallest of details: a wall, the sky, the sea, half a person.

The world to some degree is there.

If our reality was somehow lost, perhaps it could be strangely recreated from just a single Polaroid, sparking enough ideas to insinuate a world once more; igniting reality from within us.

In the world of Blowup and its mesmerising façades, reality is swallowed by its own mirror (and appropriately a mirror found within the mechanism of a camera). It is the photograph that reveals the inconsistencies that abound in Thomas’ London, and how fitting and strange a realisation that is.

Thomas literally disappears at the end of the film, having fallen into the mime of reality; acknowledged to the point of obliteration. I think this moment of extinction would have occurred sooner had he been armed with a Polaroid camera – that is if the photos had survived Jane’s probable attempts to destroy it – imagining an alternative scenario for Thomas turning to the viewer, snapping a Polaroid and fading out with the flash.

What better way to experiment with this potential than to revisit the park in question armed, not with a Nikon F, but a Polaroid camera instead? Being unusually obsessed with Blowup, my visit to the lawns and paths of this park with a camera was not my first. Ironically, my first time was with my Lomography camera.

My vision of London life had been heavily dictated by Antonioni’s film, due in part to my own naïvety. It was when staying at a friend’s flat in Stockwell that this realisation occurred and, just as for Thomas, it was during wandering and photographing London when the façade dropped and reality hit home.

I was in the capital looking at potential rooms to rent. My post-graduate degree was transferring from Liverpool to London quite by chance. I was staying with my friend Harriet, whose Cambridge-inflected voice I found a little alluring after a recent breakup. She could have been straight out of Blowup if not for her deeply modern addiction to scanning articles out of glossy magazines onto her MacBook and gazing into the blue light of her phone for large amounts of time. I fled from my own obvious feelings for her through searching for locations from Blowup, organised between finding a room to rent.

In the daytime, when not looking at depressingly overpriced flats, I was out in search of locations used in the film, being given a commission by the British Film Institute to revisit many of the locations to mark the film’s fiftieth anniversary.

I am photographing two things on my visits to film locations: the scenario as it is now, and the relit memory of what once was in the films. The framing is dictated by what the filmmakers did, the subject dictated by reality as it stands now. It is an unusual, ventriloquist form of photography.

Even when of banal places, photographs of film locations seem endlessly interesting to me. Finding the London of Blowup had been a strange process, not only in getting a sense of the size of London itself (having been skilfully created in the film via a collage of very different, far apart locations), but also in facing the reality that Blowup was not real: appropriately the same reality its character had to face.

The streets were no longer swinging but a mixture of garish new builds and blaring mass culture. The park was ironically one of the few locations left to possess the same atmosphere though it still paled in comparison. Antonioni infamously painted the grass green and tidied up the areas he used in the film, explaining the disappointingly ragged nature of the real park today. Armed then with my 35mm Lomography box, the locations mostly had a kind of acidic quality.

The antique shop seen in the film had been torn down and replaced with a building so ugly that its architecture seemed to be a ploy to keep people away. A discarded mattress sat on the sweltering pavement where Thomas had parked his Rolls Royce, and Woolwich Road felt like an outlier, barely London at all with its endless ring roads, characterless retail parks and closed down pubs once used by dockers. The park retained some atmosphere, however, and taking photographs alone on that day with my Lomography box was enjoyable enough, not least because I was being paid to actively recreate the actions of the film.

It would be another two weeks before I would see the photographs taken on that day and I recall looking at the scans back at my flat in Liverpool with a sense of distanced interest. The park did not enter back into the room, I did not unconsciously witness a murder nor did I feel a sense of the park’s space, even with that camera’s affixed wide-angle lens. Thomas’ images were superior, and I was forced to accept that a fictional character had done a better job.

Some years later, another opportunity to visit the park arose. I had been living in London for three years since that week staying with Harriet. Photography, I find in hindsight, is a good excuse to ignore your own feelings, channelling them into inconsequential frames that no one suspects as housing more than a simple recreation of reality. All feelings for Harriet, or whoever else, could be locked into a Polaroid and stay there for good.

I had been commissioned again to photograph a handful of the locations in Maryon Park, this time explicitly for a film location column whose unique selling point was the recreation of film shots using a Polaroid camera. This was the chance, I thought, to show how a Polaroid could reflect some of the elements of Antonioni’s film.

The day was even warmer than that of my previous visit, a stifling afternoon filled with people heading to the nearby Woolwich Stadium to watch a football match. The park was filled with anomalies, as well as unintentional memories of my previous longings.

In the tennis court, which plays a vital role in the film’s final scene, an injured dove was huddled in the very corner I needed to photograph. A couple seemed to be recreating Vanessa Redgrave’s luring of her companion up to the higher reaches of the park where he would be killed. A man’s body was almost exactly where the body lay in the film, too, though he was alive and sunbathing, his body glaring pink rather than murdered black & white. I angled the Polaroid using stills of the film I had saved on my phone, admittedly preferring Antonioni’s somewhat muted 1966 colours. The Polaroid snapped enjoyably loudly and, for a brief moment, I was Thomas.

I was that hollowed man.

I took another Polaroid of the grassy plain where the main photographs occur, working out which tree Thomas hid behind in order to get his shots. The landscape still retains eeriness, as if the trees are watching.

The Polaroid is so obvious and unsubtle a device that Thomas would not have been able to remain ambiguous for long. Even with only a few people about, the Polaroid camera made me feel seen; aware of myself in the space in a way that quieter cameras occult.

The photographs sat developing in a book while the sun flooded down. Though I always allow this to happen when taking Polaroids on a location I am visiting, just in case something goes wrong, something else happens when developing occurs in the same space it captures. Similar to when Polaroids witness journeys, they also seem to drink in places, as if the finished photograph gains something extra, rather like the aura people sometimes describe as contained within holy relics. It means that it has an extra layer of memorialised space: we remember the context of the photo as well as its subject in greater detail; much like a painter of a landscape will understand their subject more than a photographer will.

The French writer Noël Arnaud once wrote that ‘I am the space where I am.’ In his statement, there is a sense that he is not only discussing the literal space that his own body inhabits but the space outside of it as well; as if his corpus is like the empty shape in a mould and the world is everything else around it, filled with life outside of his physical being.

The Polaroid taken in Maryon Park transports the space, retains the memories of that day and unlocks them, creating a similar feeling to Arnaud’s suggestion. The photograph becomes a fragment of my perception in which the whole world and its space in that moment feels implied. If I was to use Antonioni’s metaphor of photography, the sound of the breeze in the trees would not simply seep in when looking at the photo in a future instant, but the whole park would flood back, created in the space of my mind’s eye.

A memorial space.

I still map Antonioni’s scenes onto the Polaroid when I look at it but also my various trips to photograph the park. I can see Harriet’s flat in Stockwell, even though this photo never witnessed that space. I see our stumbling conversation, my awkward quietness. And yet it never saw any of this; the 35mm was my choice of camera at the time.

Photography de-realises the world as Roland Barthes once suggested, and Blowup’s narrative renders this ideal ironic. A photograph, according to Barthes, ‘completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.’ I am grateful to photography for this.

Thomas finds the opposite to be the case in regards to his own 35mm photographs. He went into the park merely to illustrate it but eventually accepts that his photographs knocked his gaze asunder to something beyond his thin world. This shifts throughout the film, depending especially on your reading as to whether he really did find a body or whether the whole of sixties London was a fiction.

‘What did you see in that park?’ Thomas’ manager Ron (Peter Bowles) asks him at a party later on in the film. Thomas is depressed and uncertain as to what he found. The situation is not helped by the fact that Ron is high and the conversation is taking place at a party a few houses down from Mick Jagger’s Fulham mansion. Veruschka von Lehndorff, the model Thomas photographed at the beginning of the film, even believes she is in Paris. Nowhere is safe from ambiguity in Antonioni’s film.

Thomas considers Ron’s question for a moment and then answers despondingly, ‘Nothing, Ron.’

What did I see when I visited Maryon Park? Evidence, perhaps, of my own inability to convey anything even vaguely approaching feelings, my desire to disconnect from reality? My Polaroids, on the other hand, saw the whole world beyond my own limitations, even if, to this day, they still only show images of an empty park.

Part 7