Stanley Kubrick exposed

The world’s most influential film-maker’s first love was photography. In his short, but exceptionally impressive career as a photographer, Stanley Kubrick took thousands of photographs for the magazine Look: reportages that make a lasting impression and that can be seen until 1 June at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts.

“To make a film entirely by yourself, which initially I did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography,” observed Stanley Kubrick. The director of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was only sixteen when he sold his first picture to Look magazine for 25 dollars. The photograph in question showed a newspaper vendor, looking dejected and surrounded by newspaper headlines announcing the death of Franklin Roosevelt. A man in mourning – except that he wasn’t really. Kubrick later admitted that he had persuaded him to strike that pose. The tone was set: Kubrick wanted to tell stories and was willing to give reality a helping hand to do so. He was not one for Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment.

The brilliant film-maker was no highflier at school. “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation,” he observed. “Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” For his thirteenth birthday his father, Jacques, gave Stanley a Graflex camera. He used to wander the streets of his home town, New York, with it, imagining himself as Walker Evans. In 1938 young Stan and his father had visited the exhibition “Walker Evans: American Photographs” in the Museum of Modern Art. Evans is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration. The FSA had commissioned him to sketch a photographic picture of an America that was heading for better times, but Evans’s portraits bore witness to a collective tragedy. He photographed people head-on. They stare into the lens, without looking for sympathy, but their gaze betrays harrowing circumstances and lives of extreme poverty. Pictures that leave their mark.
In 1946 Kubrick got a job with Look. Those wanderings around New York and his photographs for the school paper at Taft High School bore fruit. With his practiced eye he produced one photo-reportage after another. He drew inspiration from the social reportage of Walker Evans but was less objective and more manipulative. His documentary approach also owed a lot to the work of Arthur Fellig. Under the name of Weegee, he recorded the dark side of the streets of New York. No crime escaped Weegee’s aggressive flash. He developed his hard black-and-white pictures in an improvised darkroom in his car before offering them to the dailies.

A director is born
The city of New York also played a leading role in Kubrick’s photographs. Not only in them, but also in his first feature film, Killer’s Kiss (1955), we see characters surrounded by the sinister metropolis. The exhibition opens with an excerpt from the film before moving on to his photo-reportage “Life and Love on the New York Subway” (1947). Photographed close-up, people read books or newspapers, sleep, kiss, and apparently let themselves be photographed willingly. For this series Kubrick kept his camera concealed: what he wanted to record was not to be disturbed.

Kubrick photographed a new America. After the years of the Great Depression the people in his pictures were no longer always fearful, uncertain, worn-out, and drifting. There were moments of joy and of unity. Kubrick emerged as a photographer with a superb sense of composition, timing, and light and with a nose for a story. About a travelling circus, about a jazz club, or about students at Columbia University. Or about Mickey, a twelve-year-old shoeshine boy from Brooklyn – or big names like the actor Montgomery Clift and the boxers Walter Cartier and Rocky Graziano. The reportage “A Day in the Life of the Boxing Champion Walter” (1949) foreshadows Kubrick’s acclaimed later work as a director. A year later it was followed by another reportage featuring Graziano. In 1951 he had a go at a sixteen-minute-long documentary. Day of the Fight was a successful portrait of Walter Cartier in moving images. It was followed by his resignation from Look and in 1955 came his first feature film, Killer’s Kiss, of which the director Josef von Sternberg remarked that, when a director dies, he becomes a photographer, but Kubrick’s film showed that when a director was born, the photographer doesn’t always die. If this painstakingly put-together exhibition leaves you hungry for more Kubrick, look out for the Cinematek’s Kubrick retrospective in May and June. Flagey, moreover, will be presenting two concerts of music from Kubrick films in May.

Stanley Kubrick, photographer
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