Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs

April 30, 2021 - August 29, 2021

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine years before he became known as a filmmaker and the director of such classics as Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Kubrick was born in 1928 in New York City and raised in the borough of The Bronx. As a young adult, he was less interested in formal education than in lessons learned in the real world. As a teenager with a photographic sensibility, Kubrick was already scouting human-interest stories for Look. For a budding photographer like Kubrick, there was no better place to be at the time than New York City, home to Life and Look, America's two leading pictorial magazines. Look's Manhattan office became his college, its editors and his fellow photographers his professors, and New York City his field of study. Kubrick worked at the magazine for five years (1945-1950), during which he participated in the process of making art in a collaborative setting not unlike that of the film studios he would soon enter.

Kubrick's photographs for Look generally accorded with the magazine's populist perspective, which was attuned to postwar American themes such as consumerism, entertainment, science, and the family. Sometimes, however, he deviated from its mainstream approach, indulging his idiosyncratic taste for the eccentric and offbeat. Kubrick's photography laid the technical and aesthetic foundations for his cinematography: it was through the lens of the photographic camera that he learned to be an acute observer of human interactions and to tell stories through images arranged into dynamic narrative sequences. His years at Look proved to be a basis for his subsequent career as a celebrated filmmaker - a formative period when he honed his skills as both a storyteller and a crafter of images, albeit through a different lens.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. While Mama Shops. 1947. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.11110.6. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Shoe Shine Boy. 1947. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.10368.275. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Life and Love on the New York City Subway. 1947. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.10336.11. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Columbia University. 1948. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.10365.235. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Circus. 1948. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.11379.6. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Betsy Von Furstenberg. 1950. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.12268.58. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. A Dog's Life in the Big City. 1949. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.12306.264. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

The Finnish Museum of Photography
The Finnish Museum of Photography is Finland's national specialized museum for photography. Through exhibitions, collection management, education, research, and a wide range of public and community programmes, the museum strives to promote and foster photographic art and culture in Finland. Founded on the initiative of Finnish photography organizations, the museum opened its doors in 1969 and is the oldest photography museum in Europe.
The Finnish Museum of Photography

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Life and Love on the New York City Subway. 1947. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.10292.39B. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Walter Cartier, Prizefighter of Greenwich Village. 1949. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.11122.124A. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Walter Cartier, Prizefighter of Greenwich Village. 1949. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.11122.102C. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Show Girl. 1949. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.11448.39. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Paddy Wagon. 1949. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.10581.39C. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine. Rosemary Williams, Show Girl. 1949. © Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection.

X2011.4.11169.9A. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., 1961. Used with permission of SK Film Archives and Museum of the City of New York.

Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs was organized in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York and the SK Film Archives LLC.

Virginia Hanusik: Into the Quiet and the Light

By Virginia Hanusik

Publisher : Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

2024 | 184 pages

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water―and the history of controlling it―is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry―past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.

Rawsht Twana: Twana’s Box

By Rawsht Twana

Publisher : Fraglich Publishing

2024 | 252 pages

Twana’s Box' can be described in many ways: a journey through a photographer’s rare archive, documenting the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 1974–1992; a son’s quest to find his lost father, who was murdered by a military regime; a young man’s way to piece together the fragments of a scattered family in a scattered culture; the becoming of a photographer who, through the stories of others, starts to understand his own identity in times of war. 'Twana’s Box' is not only the photo book that holds a selection of Twana Abdullah’s archive; it is a unique insight into a time and place in a region that has since completely transformed. Rawsht has spent years piecing together his father’s negatives and stories. His archival work inspired him to become a photographer himself, working for Metrography – the first independent Iraqi photo agency – before immigrating to Europe. ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, hb, Kurdish/Arabic/English

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering

By Akinbode Akinbiyi

Publisher : Spector Books

2024 | 252 pages

Taken across Europe and Africa, Akinbiyi’s images of everyday city life muse on the sociopolitical labyrinths of urban society

Whether in Bamako, Berlin, London, Lagos or Durban, British photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946) creates black-and-white street scenes that function as visual metaphors, ruminating on cultural change, social exclusion and colonialism’s effect on urban planning.

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm

By Grace Wales Bonner

Publisher : The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2024 | 184 pages

A deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, curated by the acclaimed London-based designer
This volume, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm―Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, is an artist’s book created by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.” Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores and films by artists such as Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith, among others, are juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner―Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner’s own vibrant, virtuosic designs.

Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs

April 30, 2021 - August 29, 2021

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