Stanley Kubrick's Chicago Photos

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solane

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I found the article listed below in today's Chicago Tribune (8 June 2005) in the Leisure section. there are photos on the site and some of them are quite wonderful (i included one in the post to whet your appetite).

The article mentions access to more of the images via the library of congress web site. if i find how to access those images, i will put a link up as well.

I hope you find it as interesting as i do.

a link to the article

a link to the photo gallery

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Stanley Kubrick gives Chicago a Look
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Rare, unpublished photos reveal the early visual handiwork of a great filmmaker

By Mary Panzer
Special to the Tribune

June 8, 2005

Few people know that before he started making movies, Stanley Kubrick was a star photojournalist.

Six weeks after graduating from high school, Kubrick went to work for Look magazine the way other kids went to college.

Much later, Kubrick called his job at Look "a miraculous break." It taught him a lot about photography, but more that that, Look "gave me a quick education in how things happened in the world." In the summer of 1949, Look sent him to Chicago to shoot the pictures for a story by Irv Kupcinet. He brought back 40 rolls of film and a rare record of his own education as a filmmaker.

The Kubrick-Kupcinet story, "Chicago City of Contrasts," ran five pages, and included 11 pictures. Plenty of landmarks are here: State Street at night, dinner at the Pump Room, a South Side kitchen full of kids, a cheerful stripper in the middle of her act, a jazz club, a boxing match, the floor of the stock exchange, sleek commuter trains standing in the station, a bum eating lunch alone in a rubble-filled lot on the West Side.

Like any good photographer, Kubrick had great reflexes. He knew just when to hit the shutter. Kubrick also had an uncanny ability to connect with his subjects, regardless of race, age or occupation. Through his photographs, we eavesdrop on the college kids flirting in the jazz club shadows, we share the suspense on the trading floor with a young trader, we watch the South Side kids watching out for each other.

But Kubrick shot 40 rolls of film. What happened to the other photographs? We don't need to wonder. Almost all of Look's picture files -- approximately 5 million images in the form of negatives, proof sheets and prints -- were donated to the Library of Congress in 1971, just after the magazine folded. There they remained, uncataloged, inaccessible to the public. In the mid-1990s, Congress allocated funds for the Look cataloging project, the material was opened to the public about 2001, and a user-friendly finding aid went up on the Library of Congress Web site within the last six months.

For a magazine fan and historian (that's me) the Look collection was like buried treasure -- I just needed a map to find it. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes. Once I could ask to see the material, there was too much of it! The trick was how to decide what you want to see when suddenly you can see it all.

After wading through files full of boring photographs, I finally found a photographer who never made a boring picture, ever -- though most people know him today as a filmmaker.

Among the treasure, a long interview (more than two rolls of film) with two women at a lingerie company -- a young model and an older secretary. The model wears only a strapless brassiere and a girdle -- revealing more than the stripper whose picture made it into print. The model is waiting, and smoking, and smiling. Behind her, we can see the secretary's bored face. You can't help starting to imagine what they are thinking, what they will do at the end of the day, who is waiting for them at home, who is breaking their hearts. The picture could be a still from a movie by Kubrick.

The Kubrick stories in the Look archives preserve the work of a skillful young photographer. But knowing what will come next, we don't really mourn the loss of a great career in photojournalism. Even in 1949, at their best, his photographs were almost too big and too full of drama to sit still on a page.

They allow us to watch the education of a filmmaker, assignment by assignment, frame by frame, as he learned to tell a story in pictures.

Mary Panzer is a historian of photography who lives in New York. Her new book, "Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955," is scheduled to be released in the fall.
Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune
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I love his work in both formats of film :) His early photog work shows in all his movies till the day he died. Sometimes it can annoye you, but other times its just wonderful to look at :)
 
Wow, they do look like his movies. Spacious, dramatic, somewhat "cold", with a weird point of view that almost seems to make everything into satire.

>Hmmmm ... are there any for which an on-line digital image is available? Anybody know?<

Not that I could tell. Looks like you can to the Library and take a look at his contact sheets, however. They even give you a loupe and white gloves. Maybe next time I'm in DC.

Now the guy question: What kind of camera was he shooting?
 
solane said:
that's not a guy question! i was thinking the same thing! :D
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I was thinking that too. The article said "rolls" so I assume it wasn't a Speed/Crown Graphic.
 
Watch Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" sometime. You can pause the action just about anywhere in the film and have a well composed black and white "print".

No doubt about it, the man was a genius.
 
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