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Stanley Kubrick’s New York comes alive in new exhibit

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The director’s early work as a photographer for Look magazine are on view

By Amy Plitt
Stanley Kubrick, from “Life and Love on the New York City Subway”, 1947
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York / SK Film Archive, LLC

Before he was a genre-bending, award-winning director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer—one who captured the everyday lives of New Yorkers in cinematic images that hinted at what was to come in his later years. The Bronx-raised Kubrick was just 17 when he began working for Look magazine as a staff photographer, a job that took him to every corner of New York City (and beyond) over a period of five years.

Now, more than 120 of these photos are collected in “Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs,” opening on May 3 at the Museum of the City of New York. The photos are from the museum’s collection of Look photos, and will also be collected in a book of the same name, to be published by Taschen as a companion.

The photos are not the sort of conceptual work you might expect from the director of A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Given the venue—Look was a general-interest publication, in the vein of Life—the photos are a more mundane look at New Yorkers’ day-to-day lives, from kids playing in the street to tired couples riding the subway. Still, it’s fascinating to see the city through Kubrick’s eyes; as the New York Times noted, without his career at Look, his later work would almost certainly have never come to fruition.

“By the time I was 21 I had four years of seeing how things worked in the world,” Kubrick told an interviewer in 1972. “I think if I had gone to college I would never have been a director.”

The exhibit is on view at the Museum of the City of New York from May 3 to October 28.

From “Park Benches: Love is Everywhere”, 1946
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC
From “Faye Emerson: Young Lady in a Hurry,” 1950
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC
From “Fun at an Amusement Park: Look Visits Palisades Park,” 1947
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC
From unpublished assignment “Shoeshine Boy,” 1949
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC
From “Columbia University,” 1948
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC
From “Shoeshine Boy”, 1947
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC
From “Johnny on the Spot: His Recorded Adventures Mirror the New York Scene,” 1946
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York/SK Film Archive, LLC

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