All play and no work makes Stanley a dull boy.

September 20, 2014 5:39 AM

Stanley Kubrick’s Photos of New York Life in the 40s.
posted by Room 641-A (13 comments total)

I think #19 is destined for a long, long life as a Reddit meme.
posted by escabeche at 5:47 AM on September 20, 2014

Wow! Many of those look like stills from a movie! 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8 in particular.
posted by sourwookie at 5:54 AM on September 20, 2014

The vantage point from which many of these photos were taken has led me to conclude that Stanley Kubrick was in fact 12 inches tall. They're lovely photographs, mind, but I don't think he gets enough credit for accomplishing everything he did, given his diminutive stature.
posted by wabbittwax at 6:02 AM on September 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

Also "7. Laboratory at Columbia University – 1948" looks exactly like Dr. Strangelove.
posted by wabbittwax at 6:04 AM on September 20, 2014 [7 favorites]

That sideshow guy was pretty hardcore.

And yeah, he did seem to like to take photographs from about crotch level.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:10 AM on September 20, 2014

Posted previously, although the site that Twisted Sifter got all these from no longer works.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:51 AM on September 20, 2014

wabbittwax: "The vantage point from which many of these photos were taken has led me to conclude that Stanley Kubrick was in fact 12 inches tall. They're lovely photographs, mind, but I don't think he gets enough credit for accomplishing everything he did, given his diminutive stature."

He may have been using a camera with the viewfinder on the top so that he could hold it down near the ground and look down into it to compose the shot.
posted by octothorpe at 7:06 AM on September 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

Posted previously

Looks like my early morning search skills are FUBAR. Mods, delete if need be.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:17 AM on September 20, 2014

We can see him taking a picture from just above hip level in the first shot.
posted by iotic at 8:00 AM on September 20, 2014

Wow, that is one ill-fitting suit in the self-portrait.
posted by mynameisluka at 9:07 AM on September 20, 2014

So number 4, Shoe Shine Boys (Vendor) is really... Like... So all those old guys with their pants pulled up high, that's not just something they do cuz they're old, but a trend they did when they were young that they carried into old age out of habit?
posted by symbioid at 9:09 AM on September 20, 2014 [6 favorites]

He may have been using a camera with the viewfinder on the top

We can see him taking a picture from just above hip level in the first shot.

That's a 35 mm camera and that print is horizontal but all the others are square, so I think he was using a reflex camera with the ground glass on the top.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:58 AM on September 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have really enjoyed Kubrick's movies but just now I'm sort of struck by the fact that the men in these pictures are hard at work on all manner of interesting things and the women are almost entirely either 1) looking (very!) pretty or 2) working hard at looking pretty. And the same could be fairly said about all or nearly all of his movies, too. Hard to say, from all this distance in space and time, how much of that is attributable to his own biases and how much to the state of his environment.

#6, "Johnny on the spot," baffles me. I have no idea how this man got a window washer into his camera or why. Is that a microphone? And a bucket?
posted by Western Infidels at 3:38 PM on September 20, 2014 [3 favorites]