Nice Jacket: Blow-Up and Other Stories

*The Collier Books 1971 Third Printing of Julio Cortázar's Blow-Up and Other Stories.

Writers and lawmakers had contemplated the moral and social implications of photography for decades before Cortázar published Blow-Up in the mid-60s. The peeping tom strikes us as the creepiest kind of voyeur. Give him a camera and his offense becomes a civil issue. He's now not only breaking the law, he's also infringing on our rights. With the recent prevalence of social networking, which integrates photography into our daily discourse to a degree unimaginable only a decade ago, an individual's control of their privacy and personal image is even more tenuous.

In the 60s Cortázar, and filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, who adapted Cortázar's story, and Michael Powell, whose Peeping Tom stands up even better as a psychologically terrifying and socially relevant document, sexed up the idea of the camera's power, both over the photographer and the subject. It's an issue we should reexamine, now that a million drunk college girls are indiscriminately sharing pictures of themselves draped over each other at the bar.

Collier's cover of the Cortázar collection shows a grainy close-up of a photographer, his piercing eye contrasted with the glare of the camera's lens. Underneath, the same image is shown at a greater remove, suggesting motion and distance. The photographer's stare becomes horrifying because of its vapidity. Its mere presence is cause for alarm, like the stranger standing on the tower in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

These movie posters are sinister in two different ways. The poster for Blow-Up uses negative space and the human form to show the photographer's wicked power. The poster for Peeping Tom shows a more paranoid image, the light from a keyhole imposed over a bloodshot eye. Great typography all around.


Check out this intense trailer for Antonioni's film.



Look out! for this trailer for Powell's film which reminds me of a module of Look Around You a hilarious British parody of educational films.



Related Links

1. Cortázar Interviewed for The Art of Fiction

2. The Times Review of Antonioni's Blow-Up

3. The Times Review of Peeping Tom