David Alan Mellor Livres

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up is a masterfully constructed and paced exploration of the enigmas that challenge our interpretations of both the moving and the still image. Photography plays a key role at the very core of the film, providing the metaphorical site for the director's questioning of the relationship between reality and perceptions. This book provides a fresh and stimulating study of Antonioni's masterpiece. It reassembles and re-tells - through onset stills and the original blow-ups - the film's key narrative and pictorial strands in a focused visual investigation that is complemented by the authors' analytical essays. These texts draw on new research and effectively situate the film in the social and creative contexts that informed Antonioni's screenplay and art direction - on the one hand through an account of the milieu of fashionable photographers and models and the media through which they became so vivid a phenomenon, and on the other hand through the revelation of the artistic and literary reference points that so pervasively enrich the film.

Born in England in 1904, Beaton is one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century. This eccentric multi-talented individual also worked as a designer and novelist. Responsible for the ground-breaking and much-imitated glamour portrait, Beaton's subjects included Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Sir Winston Churchill, and the British royal family. In 1939, he took a detour from the world of high style and produced some of the most memorable images of Britain in the war years. After the war, he continued his work as a portrait photographer, but started to design costumes for Hollywood films, winning an Oscar for ?My Fair Lady.? In the 60's Beaton gave fresh life to his photographic style, with portraits of Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and many Hollywood legends. ? comprehensive overview of one of the 20th century's great photographers ? An important documentary record of the finest historical and celebrity photography by a master of the medium.