London Calling

It was the sixties. Fashion, films and sexual attitudes were changing. Antonioni made Blow Up, but who took these recently discovered photographs?

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After blazing a mesmerizing cinematic trail through the enervated downside of post-WWII Italy in L'Avventura and Eclipse, Michelangelo Antonioni trained his lens on London and made Blowup, a film so definitively cool it remains the seductive alpha and omega of all the self-love, self-loathing and philosophical tail-chasing that have haunted us right into the new millennium. David Hemmings played the fashion photographer who realizes that he's accidentally photographed Vanessa Redgrave luring her lover into position for an assassin's bullet. In swinging London, where everyone is getting high, getting laid or getting their picture taken, the crime goes unsolved when the evidence of it--the blowups--are stolen. Now a new mystery surrounds the almost 40-year-old film. Lemuel, of Headquarters in L.A., recently showed a group of photographs taken on the set of Blowup--some candid, some posed, some nearly identical to frames from the film--and nobody seems to know who took them. "It's possible that the person who took the photos isn't even with us anymore," Lemuel says. The mysterious, anonymous show is headed for New York, where it will make yet another Blowup-ian comment on life lived amid so many pictures and so little revelation.

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Virginia Campbell