Essay Example on Blow-Up: Seduction, Photography, & Mystery

The short story, Blow-Up, gravitates around photography and gains momentum when Roberto Michel spies on a blonde woman who was seducing a teenage boy and takes photos of them. After wandering down the Quai de Bourbon, he spots the two characters whom, as he notices, "was not a kid and his mother, and that it was couples… we see them leaning up against the parapets" (Cortazar 27). He describes further that the boy's nervous reactions also indicated that the scene was seductive. He says that the boy "was standing as if it were the edge of a flirt, holding itself back in a final pitiful decorum" (Cortazar 27). Upon taking the photo of the two, the woman angrily charges towards Michel, blames him for spying on them, and demands the photo as the boy escapes. In the short story, it is evident that photography provides a unique approach to experience and deeply connect with nature.

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Photography is a vital tool in noticing and capturing vital and eye-catching scenes or events within the environment. Michel emphasizes that as a person walks around with a camera, “one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not lose that abrupt and happy rebound of the sun’s rays off an old stone…, or a small girl going home with a loaf of bread” (Cortazar 28). The simple pictures taken out of photography tells a lot about the world, the immediate environments, and humanity. They are not only stories of memories and history but can be important items through which it is possible to rethink nature and human actions and to change necessary courses (Kenaan 547). Perhaps, this can explain why "Michel knew that a photographer always worked as a permutation of his ways of seeing the world as other than the camera insidiously imposed upon it” (Cortazar 28). For him, after wandering along the river, he could not find something to enjoy but a couple and pigeons.

Additionally, photography provides an opportunity to examine nature before and after taking a photograph leading to a deeper understanding of nature and what it contains. Before taking a photo, a photographer disintegrates himself from common thinking and develops a subjective consciousness in assessing and understanding the subject of photography. In the words of Chen (133), the true art of photography manifests through “the integration of emotions and reasons and the attempt to get rid of certain social fashions and social trends.” This is exactly what happens with Michel when he starts to realize there was no mother-kid relationship between the two subjects.

Before taking the photo, he tries to picture the events that might have led the boy to the compromising situation. After producing the photo, he spent more time looking at it, trying to uncover the underlying situations. Thus, it is also safe to argue that photography is also about creating a fictionalized reality in which the photographer's opinionated thoughts eventually is accepted as the truth in the story. Michel is aware of this photographic mistake and says to himself, "Michel is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated realities" (Cortazar 36).)

Conclusion

In conclusion, Michel successfully exhibited the relevance of photography and the creation of fiction to create an understanding of events as per the photographers' perspective. Right from the beginning of the story to the very end, the main character struggles to understand the underlying reasons that might explain the events leading to the scene that he photographed. Although he had no abstract idea about the scene, he ends up developing reasons that sound logical. This is the ideal nature of photography in an attempt to explain various phenomena within the environment.

Works Cited

Chen, Ziyan. "Analysis of Subject Consciousness of Photography Objects in the Background of New Media." International Education, Economics, Social Science, Arts, 2019, pp. 133-136.

Cortazar, Julio. "Blow-up." Blow-Up: And Other Stories, Pantheon, 2014, pp. 26-36.

Kenaan, Hagi. "Photography and Its Shadow." Critical Inquiry 41.3 (2015): 541-572