By Giulia Graziano
London in the Sixties, the world of art and fashion, a photographer, a woman and a mystery.
This is the reality that we can steal a look on from the pictures shown in the Photographer’s Gallery white rooms, in Great Newport Street this month. The exhibition is inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, filmed in 1966 in London. The black and white pictures are like windows that open up not only on an époque, but on a way to perceive the relation between reality, art and representation. Antonioni’s film is at the same time a manifesto of the Sixties’ art and a warning towards the modern obsession with images consumerism. The exhibition is in this way introduced by the words of the Italian filmmaker: “I always mistrust everything which I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.”
The central theme of the film is photography: the protagonist is a fashion photographer played by David Hammings, whose job focuses on the aesthetic construction of images. Intrigued by the possibility of taking pictures of real life outside his studio, he finds himself capturing a sequence of a couple in a park. Once developed, the pictures reveal the clues of a crime, and the photographer decides to enlarge them: in the process, however, the images get fragmented, the outlines blurred, making the pictures undecipherable. The film narrative becomes a furious search for the truth which inevitably escapes the reach of the photographer: the distance between what he thinks he saw and what his photos represent generate insolvable doubts in his mind, increasing the distance between what he saw and what his photos represent.
If photography is central to the film, cinema and painting are intimately linked with it: Antonioni’s cinematography aims at describing photography’s voyeuristic tendency towards reality, its artificiality and the perceptive alterations encountered when trying to investigate on “what’s beyond” an image. Once enlarged, in fact, a photo reveals a pattern similar to that of Stephenson’s abstract painting technique: the painter and the filmmaker, indeed, had largely worked together sharing sources of inspiration during Antonioni’s stay in London. Stephenson’s paintings also appear in Antonioni’s film and are shown in the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition, pointing to a similar but opposed visual paradox compared to that of Blow-up photography. A quote by Stephenson on one of the walls states that he never knows what he is painting: he only discovers that once his work is finished by looking attentively at the intertwined paint strokes and finally finding the meaningful figures they hide.
The interlacing among three visual arts – cinema, photography and painting – which backs the narrative rhythm of the film, represented a big source of inspiration for the art circles of London in those days. Through this film, Antonioni meant to communicate his reflection on the world of images, built by society, to an audience that inevitably was a consumer of it.
The exhibition is small but effective in taking us on a journey back to the Swinging London of the Sixties. Besides Ian Stephenson’s paintings, we find the photographic work of McCullin with view on a park, which Antonioni sent to Stephenson as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Other photographs have been taken by Arthus Evans of the film set showing the fashion studio and the protagonist work, the dark room where he enlarges the pictures, and the protagonist meeting the mysterious character played by Vanessa Redgrave. The aim of the exhibition is that of bringing together all the communicative elements that Antonioni used in order to construct his post-modernist critique to the “world of images”. The meaning in the sequence of these works of art is, like in Stephenson’s paintings, to be found at the end of the exhibition. Coming out of the quite and white rooms of the Photographer’s Gallery, we can not but notice that we are literally bombarded by what Antonioni sought to warn us against: a world of images, beyond which we do not know what lays.
Copyright 2006 GIORGIOSTUDIO – All rights reserved |
