"Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs"
The Skirball Cultural Center recently opened an exhibition of Stanley Kubrick's photographs made in the years 1946 to 1950, when he worked for Look Magazine. Kubrick is better known as a film director, helming such classics as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Shining.” Titled, “Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs,” the exhibition opened Oct. 17 and runs until March 8, 2020.
Born in 1928, Kubrick sold his first images to the biweekly photo magazine, Look Magazine, in 1945 while still in high school, and was hired on staff soon after he graduated. The exhibition covers the years Kubrick worked at Look, and almost 150 black and white photos are on display, along with issues of Look showing Kubrick's work.
The magazine published photo stories accompanied by text, and every image in the individual layouts contributed to the narrative of the overall story. Kubrick seemed to have a natural ability to shoot photos that told a story, and the images he created were full of human interest and values. Some of his photos, particularly from his later work, actually look like movie stills, and his visual sense sometimes seems more cinematic than photographic.
The majority of the photographs are portraits, and they display Kubrick’s ability to capture a prominent part of the subject's character.
In a list compiled in the early '60s of the top 10 movies that influenced him, Kubrick ranked Orson Welles' “Citizen Kane” as third on his list. That influence is visible in the unusual angles, low points of view, and dramatic lighting Kubrick often uses. A vertiginous photo from 1946 of radio personality, Johnny Grant, standing on a windowsill high above a New York City street, is shot from the floor above with the street far below.
Kubrick also explored the voyeuristic nature of photography, as shown by a shot of a young couple looking slightly surprised when caught mid-embrace on a fire escape, and another of a showgirl putting on makeup in front of a mirror, with Kubrick taking the photograph behind her. The most provocative example is an unpublished image featuring rakish cartoonist, Peter Arno, facing in the direction of the camera while talking to a nude model facing him, as she puts her hair up. The image is suggestive, mildly erotic, and suspenseful; it can lead a viewer to wonder what is going on, what the power dynamic is, and what is going to happen next.
Kubrick's time at Look, shooting these narrative images every day for several years, educated him in the art of telling stories with pictures, which is exactly what filmmaking is. This exhibition takes an intimate look at his earliest work, as well as elements of the photographs that reverberated throughout his career as a filmmaker.