Blade Runner's Loneliest Moments, Frozen by Stephen Vaughan's Camera

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner premiered in 1982, but the definitive record of its world may be a body of still photographs taken on set by Stephen Vaughan. A new collection, The Blade Runner Contact Sheets by Vaughan, is available now from Hat & Beard Press, and it makes an unusual claim: the film's power lives in its smallest parts, and Vaughan's camera is how you see them.

One photograph shows Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard leaping between two futuristic taxi cabs. Behind him, a neon sign for The Snake Pit curls in script. Pedestrians in punk haircuts and black leather stand nearby, next to Hare Krishnas in orange robes. In the distance, a man in a fedora reminiscent of Philip Marlowe carries an umbrella with a glowing stem.

The detail is the mechanism. As the critic behind the essay puts it: "If the power of the film is as the sum of its parts, Vaughan's photography isolates these parts to reveal a city vernacular." Frozen as images rather than scenes, the frames let viewers linger on a city that is strange to us but ordinary to Deckard. Every alleyway and closed door implies adventures the film never shows.

What does the set photography change for the film?

Quite a lot, structurally. Multiple cuts of Blade Runner have screened publicly over the decades, from the theatrical release to The Final Cut, which opened in 2007 on the film's twenty-fifth anniversary. Vaughan's photography, the essay argues, functions as "version control" across those cuts, plus the deleted scenes and outtake videos circulating online. Misremember a detail? The version you saw may simply not be the one someone else remembers.

The photographs also anchor the film's layered design. Scott's Los Angeles was a future refracted through an imaginary past: Deckard lives in the Mayan Revival Ennis House, Rachael wears Joan Crawford-esque tailoring, and Syd Mead's neon set designs hide magpie nods to history. Vaughan captured Sean Young seated in Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Argyle chairs — Art Nouveau from the turn of the last century — in unused footage.

The Polaroid that convinced Philip K. Dick

The sharpest collision between reality and the film comes in a Polaroid Vaughan took of Sean Young on a cigarette break. She wears the white t-shirt and textured pencil skirt from her first scene as Rachael, the replicant who takes the Voight-Kampff test (the film's empathy probe) and fails to know she's failing.

Philip K. Dick, who died three months before the premiere and saw only clips and stills, was, in his own word, "blown away." In a 1981 interview he said: "I said, that's Rachael! You could have hung pictures of a hundred different women and I would have unerringly picked out that one as Rachael. That's not a simulation of Rachael, that is Rachael. They went and found her."

The film is a very loose adaptation of Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, yet it preserves what the essay calls his lifelong interrogation of the human hunger to connect. The novel's most memorable line belongs to Pris, another replicant: "The androids are lonely, too."

Vaughan draws that loneliness out. In one image he captured Daryl Hannah's Pris standing beside mannequins, her oblique posture and downcast gaze suggesting identification with the inanimate — and shame for it. Photographs of the other replicants, played by Joanna Cassidy and Rutger Hauer, show beings whose growing awareness of the empathy they lack becomes hard to distinguish from the real thing.

A film shot entirely at midnight

Blade Runner was largely shot at night, and it asks midnight questions: What is life? Why am I alone in it? Was I hardwired for the life I have or did I become this way? Scott also ported British rain to a Southern California imaginary, producing a Los Angeles no one has ever known — wet, reflective, untethered.

The chronological vertigo is now complete. The film's setting, 2019, is squarely in our past. "Little microcosms of society form when you make a film and then, all of a sudden—poof!—it's not there anymore," Young told the fanzine Starlog in 1982. Vaughan's contact sheets are what remain of that microcosm — and, as the essay concludes, the nostalgia they elicit comes from someplace vital: it doesn't matter what, if any of it, was ever real.