Known for his enigmatic and complex mood-driven films rather than the more explicit works of his fellow Italian filmmakers, Blow up (1966), a psychological mystery, marked the first English-language film created by the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, set in the prevailing vibrant mod subculture of London during the1960s. The story follows a fashion photographer who believes that he accidentally and unknowingly captured a murder on film while secretly photographing two lovers in a park. As he enlarges the photo in his studio, the grainy details begin to show more than what he initially noticed, and the more he enlarges the image, the more uncertain he becomes about what is real. Produced on a modest budget of approximately $2 million, the film earned over $20 million at the box office, becoming the first international hit of Antonioni, and one of the most significant films of the 1960s. It also holds a special place in film history as the first British movie to break the age-long taboo and depict full-frontal nudity on screen, which led to changes in Hollywood's Production Code and ultimately contributed to the creation of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system in 1968.

Blow up (1966) starts with the trendy fashion photographer Thomas, played by David Hemmings, whose world is encircled by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, surrounded and besieged by pale-faced pranksters in his parked Rolls-Royce convertible. However, as he was already an hour late for an appointment in a studio for a photo shoot, he rushed to the studio and enthusiastically snapped several fashion photos over a slim and lean, twisting and self-obsessed model, named Veruschka, played by the model herself, wearing a loose, low-cut glittery dress with open sides and obviously naked underneath, directing her intensely, while straddling her on the floor with his camera. But the elaborate photo shoot made him significantly late for the next shoot with other models, later in the morning.

Nevertheless, as he was about to leave the studio, Thomas was called again to shoot an insipid flock of five unsmiling and motionless models, standing diagonally before rectangular black glass panes in their usual stereotyped poses, like brainless and expressionless mannequins. However, by that time, the model girls had made him sick and irritated by their mechanical appearance and casual approach, and he wrapped up the photo session as quickly as it could be. But even then he could not escape easily, as he was stopped by two young ‘wanna-be’ teenage models near his studio, urging him to take their pictures, and had to brush them off, and drove to visit a small antique shop, intending to purchase a landscape. It is obvious that Thomas was sick and frustrated of the regular photo shoot of the stereotype model girls and his creative mind was looking for a respite. But when the elderly, cranky shopkeeper told him that his shop was devoid of any cheap bargains, he decided to shoot photos in natural surroundings, and visited the nearby serene Maryon Park in East London.

Wandering into the park, Thomas casually took pictures of flocks of pigeons, a litter collector, wind blowing through trees, and the wide expanse of green grass; and then suddenly saw from a distance a couple of seemingly lovers, a young female in her 30s, dressed in a tight gray skirt with a black kerchief, and a middle-aged man around 60, in a light-gray suit, engaged in embracing and kissing. He then followed the couple in the park and furtively captured several pictures with his voyeuristic camera. However, as he was about to leave the quiet park, the woman suddenly noticed him and pursued after him, demanding the negatives, claiming he had invaded their privacy, and then tried to grab his camera. When Thomas rigidly refused to oblige, she stated that their meeting was to be forgotten and ran off down the length of the meadow, and it seemed that her male companion had disappeared from the park. However, before leaving the park, Thomas took few more shots far away at the other end of the meadow.

After leaving the park, Thomas met his agent Ron for lunch, and during their meal, he noticed a tall, fair-haired stranger looking at his car suspiciously, and then quickly disappeared by hiding behind a group of Africans dressed in colourful traditional dresses. Nevertheless, ignoring the incident, Thomas went back to his studio, only to find Jane, the mysterious woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave, who immediately began to persist urgently to give her the undeveloped roll of film, asserting that the exposure of the photographs would be harmful to her private life. Toying with the woman, Thomas offered her a drink of whisky, falsely promised to return her the exposed film roll, and suggested that she would make an excellent fashion model. At that moment, Jane somehow felt that she could obtain the film only by bargaining with the man through sexual submission, and she removed her clothes, becoming topless, to flirt with him sexually. With her bare skin partially covered by ostrich plumes, Thomas approached her as she waited for him to touch her naked breasts, but to her surprise, he simply asked her to get dressed and then took the film roll from his camera, replaced it with a different roll of undeveloped film, and returned it to Jane, who behind a purple backdrop, coyly crossed her arms over her bare chest. With the film roll now in her possession, she thanked him with a brief, fleeting kiss, and then turned back to receive a more forceful kiss as he took her in his arms and gesticulated her towards his bedroom. However, they were interrupted by a loud buzzer, and it was unclear whether they had sex together later. Nevertheless, they were seen smoking together, after which she slipped on her blouse and left, after providing him a contact number, which was fake.

After her departure, Thomas enlarged the film of Jane and her lover, which revealed Jane appearing to look worriedly at a person lurking in the trees with a pistol. He then took several enlargements of the images using closer shots and larger blow-ups, until arrangements of light and shadow, dots and blurs, and discovered that he might have photographed a possible murder. However, before coming to a conclusion, he was again disturbed by a knock on the door from two teenage girls, who paid their second visit to his studio, to have their pictures taken with some of his fashionable model outfits. While they were trying on clothes in the dressing room, Thomas stripped off the clothes of the skinny blonde, pulled her by hair and grabbed her towards him, as she screamed and tried to free herself, claiming that her dark-haired friend with a better figure would be better for him and started to wrestle also to strip her. After that, the two topless girls ran into the photo-shoot studio where all of them rolled around and crashed the roll of purplish-blue backdrop paper as their tights were pulled down and completely removed, making an ideal place for presumably threesome sex amidst screams and laughter.

Exhausted by the boisterous play, Thomas had fallen asleep on the floor, and was awakened by the two girls who helped him to put on his socks and shirt. He then asked the girls to leave after promising them to take their photos the next day. After their unhappy departure, Thomas started to resume his work on the photos, using a magnifying glass to look for more details. After enlarging one of the photos, showing the female standing by the tree and bushes at the far end of the meadow, he found two grainy blow-ups, which appeared to be the body of a man shot by the gunman. Thomas presumed that he accidentally recorded the evidence of an actual murder, and immediately drove back to the vacant park to find the body of a grey-haired man. Unfortunately, he did not have his camera with him to take a picture of the body, and scarred by the sound of a twig breaking, hurriedly ran to the park's exit. He returned to his studio to find it ransacked, with all the blown-up pictures on the wall and the negatives, possible evidence of the apparent park murder, were missing, except the extremely grainy and fuzzy blown-up picture of the body on the ground, lodged between two storage cabinets.

Thomas tried to contact his collaborator Ron over the phone to tell him all about the dead body in the park, but as he could not reach him, he started to drive to meet him in person, when he spotted Jane on a sidewalk. But as he glanced at her, she turned and began to step away and got lost in the crowd. After walking through a number of corridors and doors to find Ron, Thomas found himself in the Ricky Tick Club, where the Yardbirds, the English rock band, were performing before a seemingly lifeless audience. But as a buzzing noise began to emit from a loudspeaker, the lead member of the group became enraged and smashed his guitar into an amplifier and then stomped on it. The incident gave birth to a disturbing pandemonium, when Thomas rushed out of the club and finally located Ron among a dozen of stoned and disoriented young people, rolling joints and smoking dope, at a fashionable and elegant cocktail party in a gated apartment building. Despite the situation, when Thomas excitedly started to report him about the murder in the park, they were interrupted by a totally-stoned Veruschka, the model from earlier in the morning. However, although Ron was disoriented and was uninterested and disbelieving about Ron’s story, he asked Thomas in a low voice about what he saw in the park, when Thomas capitulated that he also could not comprehend or explain what he saw, and simply replied that he saw nothing. That was the last dialogue of the film, after which Thomas joined the party at Ron's insistence and woke up in his house at sunrise. He then went to the park alone, only to find that the body had vanished, and a mime group was performing a mock-tennis match at the park. Thomas picked up the imaginary ball and threw it back to the two players when asked. As he continued to watch the mimes play, with the thud of the ball being played, his image slowly faded away, leaving only the grass.

The taut and provocative film about perception and voyeurism, combined with a mysterious murder, Blow-Up (1966), was a massive box-office success, defying its art-house genre to become a commercial hit, and also the most successful international film of Michelangelo Antonioni. Critically acclaimed upon release and recognized as a masterpiece of world cinema, the film is considered one of the greatest films ever made about watching and making movies, and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967. Apart from that, it was also nominated for two Academy Awards, along with three nominations for BAFTA Awards.