At first viewing of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film masterpiece Blow-Up (1966) coincided with my emerging interest in photography in the early 1970s. The movie has been in my mind off and on ever since. Photography is at the center of the film’s mystery. Thomas, the photographer in the film, chances upon what he ultimately believes is a murder, the clue to which is embedded deep in the inherent granularity of a photographic image. The further Thomas blows up the image the more the reality of the picture falls apart. It’s the darkroom scenes in the film, the mystery of looking deep into photographs, that triggered the inspiration for this work.

It’s amazing to watch kids at play, their energy created extraordinary movement and gestures. It’s a subject I have returned to repeatedly over the years. Using a telephoto lens and fast shutter speed I often had no idea what I was getting photographically—details were revealed only later when I zoomed deep into the images. With blow-ups the photo replaces the world, the space that you explore and frame for images. The result often has a surreal quality that is completely different from the original image. Enlarging a small detail not only increases the granularity (film) or pixels (digital photo), flattening and abstracting an image, but also zooming in on a hand or sunsuit completely changes the narrative of the original picture.

Each of these works is actually a double blow-up. Two details from a single source picture layered—a collage of two printed images. These photographs were shot in both film and digital formats, each having a very different look. Grain and pixels, the building blocks of photographic images, become a central character in these works.