The first glimpse of Kubrick’s genius

June 22, 2018 11:45 AM

Stanley Kubrick was 17 when he joined Look magazine in 1945 as a staff photographer, shooting feature stories all over his hometown of New York City. He spent the next five years working on stories that focused on New Yorkers and their daily lives. Looking back at Kubrick’s early photos, one can get a glimpse of what he would he eventually become.
posted by DirtyOldTown (9 comments total)

These are lovely and a unique glimpse into things that we'd eventually see on a larger screen. Great share.
posted by Fizz at 12:05 PM on June 22, 2018

“New York’s subway trains are a reading room on wheels, a lover’s lane and, after 11 p.m., a flophouse,” Kubrick wrote in his photo essay for Look.

Some things never change. Well, reading phones instead of books or newspapers now.
posted by Splunge at 12:08 PM on June 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

The first photo in that article, of a Columbia University researcher taken by Kubrick in 1948, bears a striking resemblance to Peter Sellers' character Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick's 1964 film of the same name.
posted by New Frontier at 12:29 PM on June 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wow.

I don't know anything about photography, but how is he able to keep both the foreground and background in focus?
posted by notyou at 12:59 PM on June 22, 2018

The smaller the aperture of the lens, the less light gets in, which results in greater depth of field (i.e. more things are in focus from front to back). Of the photos where both the background and foreground are relatively in focus, there was a lot of light to work with (the circus photo is taken outdoors, and the dancers have a very bright light coming from the front left), so he was able to use a smaller aperture (which would require a longer shutter speed if there wasn't as much light).
posted by jonathanhughes at 1:42 PM on June 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Or as Weegee says, "f/8 and be there."

Something a lot of digital photographers don't consider because they are constantly chasing wide apertures to produce a narrow depth of field and bokeh, plus easily taking pictures in the dark.
posted by linux at 2:15 PM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Conversely, Kubrick was legendary for his use of an f/0.7 lens made by Zeiss for NASA – very fast, lets in a ton of light, so with very shallow depth of field – so he could shoot Barry Lyndon's interiors with natural light.

Also a nice video here from a previous exhibit of this work.
posted by nicwolff at 2:17 PM on June 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Thanks. I will be in NYC next week and now I'm planning to see the exhibit!
posted by stevil at 10:08 AM on June 23, 2018

If these were found in a time capsule it could easily be assumed that all New Yorkers in the late 1940s and early 1950s were white. Was the writer of the article subconsciously biased by his own prejudices in selecting which photos to include? Or was Kubrick?
posted by mareli at 6:04 AM on June 24, 2018