THE UNKNOWN KUBRICK
By John Morgan (altered slightly by the editor)
On viewing any of director Stanley Kubrick's cinematic masterpieces,
it becomes immediately apparent that each and every frame of his films has been subjected to extreme care and precision. This
is just one of the many elements that make Kubrick unique as a director. Many commentators have speculated that this is the
result of the origins of Kubrick's career: namely, his apprenticeship as a still photographer.
Strangely, while this fact is widely known and acknowledged, not
a single commentator has ever gone back and blown the dust off of Kubrick's photographic work. This page is an attempt to
rectify this situation.
On his thirteenth birthday, Kubrick's father presented him with
his first camera. Kubrick immediately took to photography, and it soon became one of his favorite hobbies. It was while he
was still in high school, at age 16, that Kubrick happened to snap a photo of a newsstand owner on the morning following FDR's
death. He soon sold the photograph to Look, a well-known news and photo magazine, for $25.
Due to his total lack of interest in public school, Kubrick barely
managed to finish, and soon found himself out of school and without any prospects for enrollment at the college level. In
a fortuitous move which Kubrick has claimed was more an act of generosity than of appreciation for his skill, Look
decided to employ him as an apprentice photographer. Over the next several years, Kubrick worked as a staff photographer,
working on both "grunt" assignments and his own inspirations. It is the latter in which his budding talents can most clearly
be detected.
The question now arises: is the theory that Kubrick's cinematic
style has its origins in his photography, borne out by the facts? Judge for yourself. Most of Kubrick's Look work is
extremely pedestrian in nature (to be expected considering the nature of the assignments he was given), but occasionally one
of the pieces, particularly his photographic essays, proves interesting. Due to the large volume of work that Kubrick produced
for Look, I have only included the pieces I think to be of particular interest here.
The most striking thing about the pieces I've included on this
page are their subject matter. As you will see, many of them show signs of the same preoccupations which appear in Kubrick's
films. Many of them are also extremely funny in an absurd way, also rather like his films.
Unfortunately, these images are
not of very high quality. I rely on my University Library for copies of Look, and unfortunately they have junked the
original copies in favor of microfilm, thus precluding a clear transfer from original to screen. If you have copies of Look
from the period 1945-early '50s and would be willing to donate or sell any of them, please drop me a note. As I'm currently a poor suffering undergraduate, I'm afraid I can't offer very much in the way of money, but I will
consider any offers.
