Rant

Rant

I used to rant a lot, but I’ve been working on it. When I was young, my temper was inflammable, and I vented it far too often on people who didn’t deserve it. It’s been part of growing up (a process that I know is still incomplete at 67) to control it and be kinder, and it’s taken a lot of work.

So these days, I try not to rant: I know I’m physically quite big, and have a loud voice, combined with the inestimable advantages of being white, male and middle-class English. I am under few illusions about the advantages this gives me in – say – talking to the police compared with Shafiq or Barrington or Lexi, who all live in the same town. Ranting is taking advantage when life’s dealt you a decent hand: it’s seen as potentially criminal if you haven’t got any aces or trumps.

So if I’m actually going to rant, to undo all the safety catches (except the ones preventing me using certain technical audit terminology, which non-auditors may perceive as swearing), I need to have a fictional subject, or victim. And I’ve chosen Thomas. I despise him, and not only because he was having fun in Swinging Sixties London while I was being a provincial teenager. Mainly, it’s because he did just about everything he could to ruin my reputation and those of my friends. Because Thomas was a conniving, egotistical exploitative little spawn of the devil, and a professional photographer.

If you haven’t seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, you won’t know the obnoxious misogynist. You won’t have seen his inappropriate antics as he works his way through assistants, friends, hangers-on and (particularly) models feeding curiosity, ego, and a desire to humiliate and embarrass as many people as possible. A brief look at the poster that depicts Thomas sitting astride a model lying on the floor suggests that he wouldn’t know what ‘inappropriate’ means if it smacked him about the face with a wet fish.

Thomas incorporates all the worst features of every photographer who isn’t actually cruising for a criminal record: I certainly wouldn’t suggest a model work under his guidance or body weight, and I’d hate to share a studio or a coffee with him. It is almost certainly not coincidence that Andy Hamilton invented a character called Thomas for his radio series Old Harry’s Game – the most despicable human being ever.
The critics will tell you that Blow Up explores the inherently alienating qualities of our media, or that it’s a hypnotic conjuring act. I won’t deny either, but I will suggest that Thomas alienates every non-photographer and suggests that our (photographers) skill lies in hypnotising innocent young women.

It’s a brilliant film, with an intriguing story in there somewhere. Every photographer who works with models should view it as a training exercise in how not to behave – even Thomas’s brilliant shots of homeless men in a hostel (actually taken, I read somewhere, but can’t confirm, by Don McCullin) are destined to be filler in a pop-art book. David Hemmings played him brilliantly, with the arrogance of the young, rich and irresponsible, a rock star with cameras.

But Thomas is not a nice person…