Down-river there is a provincial city of great character, mysteriously transplanted from the midlands and named Woolwich.¹ A busy dual carriageway speeds past the entrance to Maryon Park, Woolwich, southeast London. Charlton Athletic’s football stadium stands adjacent amid modern council low – rises. Due north, the Thames Barrier glimmers in stages across the wide river. But ships rarely navigate this once busy stretch, and silent docks and empty warehouses await redevelopment. Maryon Park’s natural hues and shapes interrupt and colour the otherwise drab and decaying landscape. Entering it reveals a familiar scene; kids playing tennis on weathered courts and couples walking hand in hand. Thickly layered leaves overhead shade the light. A path, which beckons up steep concert steps, leads to a blossoming wild meadow. It feels isolated, unnerving. Nearby traffic is the only indication of its urban location. Even though the grass is unkempt and its borders overgrown, this is unmistakably the place. Someone could disappear here and you would never know. Is this impression informed by the knowledge that this was once the scene of a murder?

The crime was committed thirty-six years ago: A young man, wearing a black jacket and white jeans, is swinging a SLR camera in his hand. The sun is soft and diffused. He walks past two municipal tennis courts surrounded by wire fencing. Dense foliage banks its perimeter. On the near court, two boys play. Beyond is a wide green clearing. The photographer runs at a flock of resting pigeons, scattering them. The photographer dances up wide steps on a path that leads to a lush, whispering meadow. A couple is visible in the distance. A silver-haired man wearing a grey suit and a dark-haired slim woman. They appear to be arguing. The photographer climbs behind a wooden fence to watch them without being seen. He brings his camera into focus. The woman flirts, coaxing the man forward. The photographer edges closer. The couple embrace. Using a solitary tree as camouflage the photographer repeatedly shoots.

Strange how the scene (almost nothing: two figures there mismatched in their youth) was taking on a disquieting aura. I thought it was I imposing it, and that my photo, if I shot it, would reconstitute things in their true stupidity.²

The photographer develops the roll of film shot in the park and begins to construct a narrative. As he prints and enlarges, details become apparent. Initially, his involvement appears to have been one of benign voyeurism, but further enlargements reveal more: the woman luring the grey man further into the meadow, a man hiding in thick bushes pointing a pistol fitted with a silencer, the woman’s knowing gaze, the prone body of the grey man lying behind a bush.

He tacked up the enlargement on one wall of the room, and the first day he spent some time looking at it and remembering, that gloomy operation of comparing the memory with the gone reality; a frozen memory, like any photo, where nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness, the true solidifer of the scene.³

Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966) continually asks: “what has been seen?” The viewer follows Antonioni’s carefully staged scenario from the photographer’s point of view. His discoveries are our discoveries. The framing we are presented with controls our knowledge. Initially, we believe, like the photographer, that we have intruded on just an illicit liaison. The protagonists’ actions and reactions enhance this notion. But if we can take our eyes off the physical drama and look at the seemingly unimportant, accidental periphery detail, vital information is visible. We are presented with a series of clues in the form of large prints. We attribute meaning, influenced by our prior knowledge, to each subsequent blow-up. As the pictorial narrative develops we become aware that this is only part of what we have seen. The final revelation shows the grey man is dead.

Antonioni’s film is adapted from a short story, Blow-Up (1963), by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar. Antonioni chose to adapt this story for his first film outside of Italy. He felt that his photographer couldn’t be an Italian, but rather a creature of the high circulation, populist British press and the musical and economic revolution. Whilst in London, Antonioni met the first generation of working-class photographers who had become celebrities in their own right. David Bailey, Terence Donovan and particularly John Cowan, provided inspiration and characterisation. It is Cowan’s studio at 39 Princes Place, Notting Hill, that is used as the photographer’s studio, and it is his photographs which Antonioni uses to ensure an authorial vision and creative authenticity for the film. Cowan’s photographs are the devices by which the film’s themes are literally revealed. In a strange coincidence, in September 1967, Cowan photographed a young woman in the King’s Road, who was murdered 48 hours later. His pictures were the last recorded evidence of her being alive.

Antonioni didn’t just observe landscape but created a singular vision that articulated the photographer’s perspective. London is encountered through his motorised journeys from the studio at 39 Princes Place. Speeding through London streets in an open-top, white Rolls Royce, dining at El Bason in Sloane Square, partying in Chelsea, shopping for antiques in Woolwich… Antonioni’s city is the photographer’s, and he never strays from this worldview.

Other London parks were considered for the film but were rejected for being too well known. Maryon Park is used for the visual impression it creates. Antonioni’s production ignored the political associations of the park in one of London’s poorest and most deprived boroughs and created a new identity wholly within the context of the film’s plot. The found environment was enhanced – production designers painted the grass, highlighting nature. The characterisation of the park envelops and, at times, overpowers the protagonists. The film resonates with the sense of disquiet.

The parks are now characteristically restful places within the noise and uproar of London. They attract those who are unhappy or ill at ease. The idle and the vagrant sleep more easily beneath the trees, together with those who are simply exhausted by the city.⁴

London’s parks are thought of as the city’s ‘lungs’, a refuge from urban weariness. The Royal Parks: Hyde, St. James, Regents and Kensington Gardens are London’s prime estates. They are high maintenance sites. The landscaped, mannered grounds with their stylised floral displays have been tamed and branded for the daily pageantry of urban life. But these showpieces are not representative of the smaller local recs, greens, fields, commons and parks that colour London’s map. These are small parts of London’s ancient topography, pieces of nature saved from the encroaching city. Many may have been swallowed by real estate developments in the last hundred years, but these neighbourhood places constitute an environmental other. In utilising Maryon Park, Antonioni emphasised the private rather than the public arena. Maryon Park is recognisable as an everyday place, which allows us to identify, and suggests associations. We have been there…

They are happy, are these little lovers of London; as all honest, simple things are happy. No great winds of passion blow like storms in their hearts. They wish to escape from their surroundings into something which is their very own.⁵

The photographer and the couple encounter one another on parkland. There is no recognition of social ranking on common ground, and Old England, so exemplified by the lover’s accents and dress, is directly confronted by a New England – one that is brash, confident, aspirational. The single-mindedness of his intent overrides the niceties and conceits of polite society. The photographer doesn’t adhere to the couple’s notion of intrusion. In the meadow, they are a photo-opportunity: nothing more, nothing less.

The park in Blow-Up initially seems to be a romantic idyll, perfect for people searching for peace and anonymity. The lovers are part of its abundant theatre. The solitude they seek at first seems natural, but it is this very isolation that is dangerous. The very same cover that encourages the couple’s embraces also masks the assassin. This duality articulates the wonder and concern felt in the open spaces that are squeezed by urban habitation. We try to focus on the evocative meadow, ignoring our fear of what the shadows may conceal.

Has this fictional crime left any visible traces? Compare images taken from the film with its present state and all the main featured elements remain identifiable: the entrance, the tennis courts, the main green, and the meadow itself. On entering the overgrown meadow it is immediately clear that this is the place. The fence that the photographer climbed over is there, and the tree he crouched behind that still stands alone. Walking towards where the couple once stood, the undergrowth is thick and impenetrable, and the silhouette of the dead man remains. Once collective memory has been transposed, the location cannot return to its pre-fiction state.

A place becomes imbued with its past, however that past manifests itself. What we seek is Maryon Park’s fictional state, our twenty-first century eyes scanning the landscape. The murder may have been fictional but its location is real and returning to the meadow is to experience the sensation that this could be the scene of a crime. The uneasiness you sense on visiting doesn’t feel like a contrivance. The act of filming, introducing alien elements, has unsettled the location’s continuum, and although the production doesn’t appear to have left any physical trace, the visitor senses its memory permeating the landscape. An irreversible change has occurred in environmental resonance and impact. Film transcription renders the familiar unique.

¹ Nairn, I, ‘Nairn’s London’, Penguin Books, 1966, 177
² Cortazar, J, ‘Blow-up and other stories’, Pantheon, 1963, 126
³ Ibid, 122
⁴ Ackroyd, P, ‘London the biography’, Random House, 2000, 179
⁵ Morton, H.V, ‘The Heart of London’, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1926, 123