The photographer visits the painter at his studio, and the painter, standing before his painting, foreshadows what's to come. Pointing to his (Cubist) painting, he explains:
"They don't mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang onto. Like that leg. Then it sorts itself out. Adds up. It's like finding a clue in a detective story."
Antonioni's Blow-Up is adapted from a story by Julio Cortázar (1914-1984). Cortázar's "Blow-Up" first appeared in End of the Game and Other Stories, later re-issued as Blow-Up and Other Stories, with a blown-up picture of its author on the cover.
Here is the scene where the photographer re-photographs a picture he took in a park. Not of a couple frolicking, but a later photo, taken while the woman is running away.
After determining that the blown-up (re-photographed) picture is that of a dead man, he returns to the park and finds the body of the man in the same place it was in the picture. From there he races back to his studio, only to "find" his negatives missing, and only one of his printed pictures: the blown-up body of the dead man. Later, the painter's girlfriend stops by, looks at the picture and says it looks like one of her boyfriend's paintings.
Did the woman in the park exist? (It was eerily windy that day.) The photographer goes looking for the woman and sees her on the other side of the street, standing with a small crowd. The crowd shifts and the woman disappears, as if into thin air.
The transition from painting to photography. A century that began with Cézanne -- and ended with Richard Prince.
