Word: photographs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...magazine has many things to offer, but the basis of success is the nude or seminude photograph that Hugh Hefner has made respectable in the U.S. prints. America was undoubtedly ready for it anyway, but Hefner seized the moment. He was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realized that the old taboos were going, that, so to speak, the empress need wear no clothes. He took the oldfashioned, shame-thumbed girlie magazine, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved...
After taking in the movie version of Oh Dad Poor Dad Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad, I walked into the manager's office at the phantasmagoric new Cleveland Circle Theatre to see about a photograph to run with this review...
...unlike the other characters in Blow-Up, the photographer is not among the living dead in Antonioni's sterile London. Antonioni's photographer is in limbo, precariously balanced on the borderline between submergence in the frenzied non-involvement around him, and commitment to reality. Essentially weak, he inevitably succumbs to the daily temptations of his life and profession. For example, in the middle of examining the most important pictures he has ever taken, he allows himself to take part in a mini-orgy with two teen-age would-be models; on his way to the scene of the crime...
...examining the nature of photography, Antonioni carefully injects another theme, the more basic conflict between illusion and reality. The first scene of Blow-Up introduces the photographer as he leaves a flop-house where he spent the night; we learn that he had gone to photograph the sick old men who sleep there. This personal preference for social realism over fashion proves the photographer dedicated. But in photographing the tragedy and problems of other people, the photographer in Blow-Up substitutes this for an understanding and eventual solution of his own problems. The reality of the photographs becomes the photographer...
This small conscious realization on the photographer's part gives his life more value, and enables Antonioni to have him finally reject the behavior of his friends. The ending establishes this conclusively: in the park, returning from his unsuccessful attempt to find and photograph the corpse, he sees the white-faced youths standing around a tennis court, watching two of their group "play" tennis with an imaginary ball and imaginary rackets. The "ball" is knocked over the fence and the group looks toward the photographer to retrieve it. He hesitates momentarily, then picks up the the imaginary ball and throws...