Between Light and Shadow: Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Photojournalism

“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” — Stanley Kubrick

Before the accolades of influential cinematic greatness with masterpieces like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Paths of Glory,” “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Barry Lyndon,” Stanley Kubrick lurked along New York’s streets as a teenaged staff photographer for LOOK Magazine. Armed with nothing more than a 35mm Contax II rangefinder camera, an impeccable eye and natural talent for composition, he made art out of light amidst the action of everyday city life.

Like Dorothea Lange did in capturing the desolate American ruins of the Depression Era 1930s, Kubrick captured in his indelible 1940s black and white images a fragile nation united by war, awash in patriotism and working for progression and a peaceful future.

He was only 17-years-old when he became the youngest staff photographer in LOOK’s history, ample reward for Kubrick’s heartbreaking photograph of a Manhattan news vendor’s deep bereavement following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945 — a photo he originally sold to LOOK for just $25. The story behind this famous photo’s authenticity is often debated whether or not Kubrick “directed” the vendor on how to pose, an impetuously brash approach he masterfully utilized throughout his decades as a legendary filmmaker.

Inspired by Walker Evans’ late 1930s “Many Are Called” photo compilation, Kubrick’s 1947 collection “Life and Love on the New York Subway” elevated the young apprentice to full-fledged photographer, a stunning retrospective of 500 photographs shot in secret on several all nighter subway rides. The concept was simple. The results were stunning. Kubrick, with a well-hidden wide open aperture to compensate for very little light, captured the pure magic of ordinary life in transit — yet another sign of an optic wunderkind knowing exactly where and how to push the limits of visual technology.

Shooting over 27,000 photographs for LOOK over a span of five years, Kubrick left the magazine in 1950 to pursue documentary and narrative filmmaking endeavors, the first of which became 1951s “Day of the Fight” (chronicling a day in the life of local New York boxer Walter Cartier) and 1953s anti-war film “Fear and Desire.” In these, as well as other early Kubrick films like 1955s “Killer’s Kiss,” we see the blossoming of a visual auteur on the verge of complete artistic freedom and utilizing his exquisite talent for playing with light.

Like his later achievements as a filmmaker, Kubrick’s work as a photojournalist shows true visual mastery and one with a instinctive proclivity for images that are distinctly human and artistic; an aptitude developed not from a film school background, but drawn from his years as a street photographer. One who broke all rules and developed methods to use modern equipment and — often limited — technologies in new and different ways to cultivate the story he was trying to tell within the confines of a 35mm frame.

Every one of Kubrick’s films between 1951 and 1999 are extensions of the influence his years as a photojournalist had on him; how seeing his world from behind the lens cultivated an obsessive, deeply profound understanding of a flawed, albeit innocent commonality. 

But to what degree?

Any photographer reading this knows that images and the cameras that take them rarely express full truths. For all of Stanley Kubrick’s successes as a narrative filmmaker, all can still be credited to his years as a street photographer. Even in those early years, he seemed to be defeating commonalities and provoking enhanced realities by deviously staging his subjects and cropping the frame to enhance dramatic effect. But these are flaws far too difficult to notice and, frankly, few would care if they did.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1940s New York street photojournalism is priceless, influential, mesmerizing beauty. For without his experience telling stories in still images, his later career doing so in motion pictures may never have materialized.

And this writer would never have been inspired to pick up a camera.