John Updike A & P Visual Analysis

A&P by John Updike is a story of adolescent mystery and somewhat naïve voyeur romanticism, so I chose the most common medium of the voyeur: the photograph. With the following photographs, like the subjects of the story, I intended to show a young girl in positions both public and private, intimate and vulnerable, as a meditation on the themes of the story. The first picture is one of the girl checking her phone in a train station, smiling at some private context and untranslatable moment on her screen, enjoying a small comfort amidst very public exposure. The green tinge of the fluorescents cast an unhealthy pallor on the scene, further isolating the subject with an atmosphere of unease. Vertical and diagonal lines of the walls around her and the contrasting colors of her outfit draw focus to her small, hunched body, our eyes go right there. This is much like in A&P, how the girls would stop and pick up small items and the narrator would infer a great and undue amount of meaning from very little clues, so the audience feels for the subject of the photograph. What’s she smiling at? We can only guess, and yet it is the focal point of the photo.
The second picture has a more documentary approach to setting, with the subject in the midground of the shot and interrupted by a barrier that is implied to have been cover for the photographer, it also reinforces the isolation of the subject from the audience.
Again, the subject has a private moment in a public space, begging the audience to interpret meaning from an innocuous gesture. Horizontal and vertical lines frame and symbolically cage the subject and the use of contrasting lighting and shadows and colors via a slight vignette create a focal point right at this implied motion. This was taken in a convenience store in underground Atlanta, much like how the A&P must have been in the story. The relationship and audience is most isolated in this shot, as both are framed out of each other’s
worlds.
The third picture is where the subject and audience’s relationship is most intense, as the subject stands lonely, looking waiting for someone out of shot. Here there are no physical barriers between audience and subject, and strong diagonal lines pull her into foreground instead of contrasting her with the background. If these pictures were a story, this would be the climax, as here the audience has the clearest connection, is making the fewest leaps or assumptions, and elements from previous shots fall into place. The audience can now create a clear story, and relationships from one shot to the next can be inferred, in a similar way to the narrator in A&P, who created fantasies of the girls, and began to see how they related to the subjects of his fantasies when he actually interacted with them. There is a palpable disappointment, discomfort, and vulnerability in the mood of the shot, just as the girls in A&P felt when confronted by the manager. Altogether, these pictures represent a study of the themes and moods created by A&P, and an introspection on assumptions I as the audience of A&P and creator of this piece had entering into this work. The photographs are intended to show the same relationship of the story through a new context and medium that has fewer textual distractions.