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.
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