Pics or It Didn’t Happen: In Praise of ‘Blow-Up’ at 50

A recent rerelease from the venerable Criterion Collection, replete with typography for the visually impaired.

Blow-Up is half a century old.

I first learned of Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking slice of surveillance cinema while watching HBO with my parents in the 1970s. I was a precocious kid, but I wasn’t yet hip to the Italian auteur’s ersatz paean to Swinging London and fashion photography, not to mention the first glimpse of pubic hair in mainstream film fare…