George Porcari was born in Lima, Peru and emigrated to the US at the age of ten in 1962 with his parents who settled in Gardena, a working class suburb of Los Angeles. His father was an amateur photographer who taught him photography and darkroom magic. He moved to New York City in 1979, where he worked at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, and briefly attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He returned to LA in 1984 to attend the Art Center College in Pasadena where he received an MFA. He is a writer, photographer and collagist who has been a working artist since his first exhibit, of collage work, in New York City in 1988; his last exhibit was in 2016 titled Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and Fifty Years that covered a half-century of his photographic work at Haphazard Gallery in Los Angeles. He has been publishing regularly in various magazines since 1987 and some of his writing and photo work can be seen in his website lightmonkey.net. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
More than half a century after they were made, Antonioni's lms remain singular and charged with mystery, existing both in and outside of their time. A photographer and lmmaker himself, George Porcari's critical understanding of Antonioni is also a spiritual understanding of art and how it is made. Porcari positions Antonioni's lms within a larger cultural history without diminishing their singularity. This book makes Antonioni's work newly alive. - CHRIS KRAUS In these essays George Porcari deconstructs, historicizes and imbues Antonioni with so much of the deserved depth and intellectual consequence that each stark image of isolation virtually dances before our eyes with connotative resonance. Porcari is a ne and careful architect of the eye, breaking down and building up, leading us through reference and structure with such a uidity that we feel we are there, alongside him, building meaning with him... a great book. An active read. Pick it up. Devour it. Then re-watch the lms anew with George Porcari. - VERONICA GONZALEZ PEN A In a perfect world, every lm school would have George Porcari teaching aspiring directors about the masters, like Antonioni, who came before them. I've certainly bene ted from my informal classes with George as his friend of several years--in fact, I believe I rst saw Blow-Up with him at a Manhattan revival house--and I've recycled some of his insights in cinematic writings of my own. Now, with this book, everyone has the privilege of spending time with George as he illuminates these splendid lms in his unique--I would even say Porcarian--way. - DUKE HANEY