Stanley Kubrick: Photographer

Spent the majority of last week in Belgium, where there was a brilliant exhibition entitled ‘Stanley Kubrick: Photographer’ on show at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. It has always been common knowledge that Kubrick spent the formative years of his life as a photographer, and prints of the work done during this period have recently been made available for purchase through the website V&M. However, aside from a few examples in odd books on the director’s films, there has never been much attention paid to his photography. Of course, this probably was a result of technical difficulties, they were undoubtedly owned by Look magazine, and as a result, hard to find. Even so, an exhibition such as this seems to have been a long time coming, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have got a chance to see it.

As far as film directors and museums are concerned, it is really only exhibitions such as this one that are worthwhile. Too often museums are wont to put on grand displays of movie memorabilia, props, and ephemera. While these surely have some sort of whimsical curiosity, and are no doubt interesting for fans, I think they struggle to amount to anything more than simple nostalgia; they certainly don’t tell us anything interesting or insightful about the director’s spiritual, artistic, and informative biography (seeing an ape costume from 2001 is hardly going to make someone appreciate the film better). Thankfully, Kubrick’s photography does tell us about all these things, and  the fact that the photographs are quite nicely nostalgic too is an added bonus!

It will hardly be surprising to someone unacquainted with Kubrick’s life, but aware of his films, that the director had his artistic beginnings in photography. The cinematography of his films is not only perfect, but also frequently technologically groundbreaking. Barry Lyndon is a famous example. It contains many scenes filmed with a lens built by the Carl Zeiss company for N.A.S.A, which had the largest aperture of any lens built for motion pictures, with an f-stop of 0.7. Kubrick was also among the first handful of filmmakers to employ the then-revolutionary steadicam and used it to its fullest potential in the Shining. As Cinematographer John Alcott said of him, ‘he is, in his heart of hearts, a photographer’.

The photographs on display in Stanley Kubrick: Photographer are a testament to the photographer inside the director. Many of the pictures display real ingenuity and creativity from the young artist, and reveal a method that would become one of the most recognisable visual styles of the 20th century. They create a complex tapestry of drama, light, shadow, irony, and melancholy to communicate that nihilistic hopefulness which warmly taints all his major films. Of particular interest was the emphasis on the Gaze in his work which would of course become a primary visual motif throughout his filmography. On several occasions throughout the exhibition we are confronted with images which are focused on the viewing subject rather than the viewed object, we’re reminded of Alex DeLarge’s cold state in A Clockwork Orange, or Jack Torrence’s murderous gaze in the Shining, or even Alice Harford’s ambiguous grin in Eyes Wide Shut. More than this, there were a few other photographs that had more than a passing similarity to some famous Kubrickian moments, I leave these collated below. 

A nuclear researcher at Columbia University compared with Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove

Two young girls walking along a cobbled street in a coastal town in Portugal compared with the haunting twins from The Shining.