審美提升 攝影大師影集 關於攝影師——斯坦利·庫布里克的一切

Hello, and welcome to Show and Tell with me, Steven Leslie, a series where I show you some photos and then tell you about them, but only if you promise to watch all the way through to the end and not get distracted. This is the first proper one I've done of these in a while, and the reason for that is simply because I've been really, really busy with the book. Copies still available on my website, of course, and there's now even a proper shop type thing, which makes purchasing one as easy and as rewarding as stroking your favorite long or short-haired dog, whichever one you prefer. I've also been doing lots of other work, but I finally chiseled out enough time in my hectic schedule to do a film all about a photographer that I've been obsessed with ever since I first started taking photographs, and I'm going to tell you all about it today, and that is the very great Stanley Kubrick. So there might be a few of you sitting there thinking, hang on a sec, Steven, I know Stanley Kubrick was a film director, arguably one of the greatest film directors ever, but I didn't know that he was also a photographer. And the simple answer is that yes, he was, he was a great photographer, and look, as proof, there are lots and lots of photos of him with many different types of cameras. But the thing is that his filmic motion picture achievements were so vast and so accomplished that they tend to overshadow his photography. Also, as you'll see very soon, Kubrick's photography was very much at the start of his career, and although he remained very much obsessed by cameras, stills photography is something that got eclipsed when filmmaking became his main obsession. And that word obsession is going to crop up quite a lot during this film, because no other photographer and no other director certainly inspires so many articles, theories, doctorate proposals as Stanley Kubrick. And I'm very much guilty of this myself. I've got all of his films on Blu-ray and DVD. I've got loads of books about him. I've got biographies. I've got personal recollections. I've got the masterpiece collection, whatever that is. I've even got a Stanley Kubrick S is for Stanley ancient T-shirt that I occasionally wear, and my phone has a shining hard cover on it. And if anyone wants to know what to get me for Christmas, then I'd really like these. This pair of one-sixth life-size Grady twins, also from The Shining, for the bargain price of just £259.31 on eBay right now. I think that Kubrick's relatively small number of finished feature films, he only made 13 in a 40-year career, means it's very easy to get obsessed with those films. They invite repeated viewings, and Kubrick cleverly and mischievously layered them with clues and contradictions that will keep people guessing for years and years. If you've never seen the documentary Room 237, you should really try and seek it out, because it's all about the absurd theories that The Shining generated, and it's really worth a watch. But while Stanley Kubrick was far from prolific as a filmmaker, he was for a brief intense time, incredibly prolific as a photographer. And that's what we're going to concentrate on today, his early photographic career. So let's start a bit with a bit of history and context. Stanley Kubrick arrived on this planet, New York City, in July 1928. He was born in Manhattan, but he grew up in the Bronx, and like so many other great American photographers, he was Jewish. His family originally came from Austria, and they arrived at Ellis Island in 1899. Stanley's father Jack was a doctor, but Stanley showed no interest in following his father into medicine, and he was actually a terrible student at school. His grades were awful, and he spent most of his time bunking off, as we called it in the UK, but I think in America they call it playing hooky. Kubrick described himself as a school misfit with few intellectual interests. So what did he do when he wasn't at school? Well, he rapidly became obsessed with two things. He got a camera at age 13, and started to take photographs, and he also started to play chess, which he rapidly became very, very good at. How good was he at chess, I hear you ask? Well, by his early 20s, he was a chess hustler playing for money in Washington Square Park. He was one of about 10 people who did this regularly, and he estimated that it earned him about $3 a day, which back in the early 1950s was just about enough to live on. And all the photos you've been looking at right now are of him on set of Doctor Strangelove, where apparently he would torment George C. Scott by constantly beating him at chess while simultaneously directing the film. And alongside chess, Kubrick studied and mastered photography, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. His father bought him a camera at age 13, and for the next four years, he set about methodically doing everything you needed to become a professional photographer. He learned how to take photographs, how to develop and print them, and then ultimately how to sell them. And this is very important, because by then, Kubrick was 16, nearly 17, and his school grades weren't good enough for him to get a place in college, mainly because he never went and it brought him to tears. But it's also important to realize that this was in 1945, it was the end of the Second World War, and all the colleges were being flooded with returning young servicemen. So no one was going to take a kid with a very low 67 grade point average. But despite his low grade point average, there was nothing average about Stanley Kubrick. See what I did there? So when he was still just 16, he sold his first photograph, and it was this one, taken of a depressed-looking newspaper vendor on the occasion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death on the 12th of April, 1945. He sold it to Look Magazine for $25, which is $10 more than he was offered by the first magazine he took it to. And fairly soon after that, he became an apprentice, and then a professional staff photographer at Look, where he stayed working for the next four years. And that story sort of encapsulates Kubrick's early genius, really. He was 16, almost 17, he couldn't get into college, he was heading towards an uncertain future, so what did he do? He took a photograph, sold it to a magazine, and got a job all before his 17th birthday. But before we plunge into his photography for Look, it's worth considering this one photo and the story behind it. First of all, Kubrick is on record as saying that much more than school, he considered photography to be his real education, and he was self-taught, very much an auto-dictator. And he also said that he saw the practice of photography as a way of problem-solving. As you can hear in this early interview he gave in 1966. And I think this is a fascinating way of looking at it. Obviously every photograph that you take is, in a way, a problem that needs to be solved. It's a problem of where you stand to compose the image, it's a problem of what shutter speed you use, what aperture you're at, on your lighting. If you get all those things right, then you solve the problem and you get a good photo. But by extension, Kubrick used photography to solve the problem of what he was going to do with his life. What was he going to do if he couldn't go to college? Well, that was a problem he solved with photography. He even admitted that he got the newspaper seller to pose for him slightly and look sadder, because he knew he'd have more of a chance to sell the photo that way. Which is exactly what he did, a director right from the off. Now, to my great annoyance, there's already another couple of films up on YouTube about Kubrick's photography. At least one of them with way greater production values that I'm capable of. But what none of those films seem to do is to talk about Kubrick's photography in context, to compare him to other photographers of the time. So that's what I'm going to try and do as much as possible. I think when talking about Kubrick, there's a tendency to consider him as such a genius, such a freak, that he is considered often in a bubble, as if he came out fully formed. But obviously that's not true. You know, there were lots of other influences and factors that weighed in on the kind of photography that he produced. Although he was definitely very, very young when he started to become more than confident. And there's only one other photographer that I can think of who achieved as much, even younger than Kubrick. And that is the Mexican photographer Enrique Metonides, who I looked at in Show and Tell episode 13 on Bad Luck in Street Photography. If you haven't yet watched that epic episode, then I urge you to go and do so. And there you'll discover that Metonides was just 12 years old when he got his first photograph published. So four whole years younger than Stanley. But the real difference between him and Kubrick is simply one of range and scope. Metonides only ever photographed one thing, tragedy in all its various forms. From car crashes to plane crashes, earthquakes and murders. Whereas Kubrick, although he started with a photograph that is obliquely about death and mourning, he didn't spend the rest of his career only photographing grieving, sad newspaper vendors. And much of this has to do with his employer's look magazine. So as mentioned, Kubrick grew up in New York City in the 30s and 40s. And there really couldn't be a better compost in which a young photographer could learn and grow. New York at the time was really the center of the arts of the entire world. The architecture, the music, everything that was going on was just truly fantastic. And for a visually minded person like Kubrick, it must have been like a candy shop. And don't forget that there were lots of, just after the Second World War, the main way that a lot of these ideas were disseminated was through magazines. And so for Kubrick to get a job at Look was perfect for him. And he said that, you know, working at Look taught him how to see. Look wasn't the only magazine like this, of course. There was Life, which was the older, more famous magazine. And many, many other newspapers and periodicals. But Kubrick found an exclusive home at Look. And for the next four and a bit years, they published almost 1,000 of his photographs. And they even, when he was 19 years old, they even ran this special little story on him. Veteran photographer Stanley Kubrick makes up for youth with zeal. The article even ends with the telling passage that in his spare time, Stanley experiments with cinematography and dreams of the day when he can make documentary films, which he certainly went on to do. And on the surface, it might seem like a strange fit. You know, Look magazine was a relatively mainstream, conservative, family-orientated publication. And those are not traits that you would usually associate with Stanley Kubrick. But we need to remember that this is a young, teenage Kubrick, not yet the older Maverick. And I actually think that the restrictions that working for Look would have placed upon him forced him to visually problem-solve in a very constructive and creative way. And that would have informed his photography and helped him with his growth. Now, earlier on, I mentioned the Mexican photographer Enrique Metenides. And he was shooting in Mexico for a different type of paper altogether, particularly La Prensa, which was a Nota Roja, which translates as Red Note or Red Newspaper, which was a sensationalist publication focused almost exclusively on stories about crime, accidents and natural disasters. Look magazine would obviously never do anything like that. And this forced Kubrick to be way more subtle in his approach. One of my favorite early stories of his is this one, which he shot in 1946 without anyone knowing in a dentist's waiting room. Unfortunately, most of this series is nowhere to be found online, so some of these scans are dodgy ones that I've had to do at home. But I absolutely love what's going on here. Kubrick came up with the idea after taking this photo of himself waiting at the dentist's. You can see that selfie here. But then he turned his camera on the other people waiting alongside him, although I don't think he had anything to do with some of the cheesy little captions underneath. But this to me is the kind of quintessential Kubrick photo series, because it's both ordinary, there's nothing unusual about waiting to see the dentist, it's incredibly matter-of-fact. But I don't think I've ever seen it photographed by anyone else before or since. And there's a real sense of menace, fear and dread to some of these images. It's Lynchian, but years before David Lynch. Funnily, if we now go back to that first ever photo that Kubrick sold to one of the newspaper vendors, it now looks as if he's got a toothache and could also be waiting to see the dentist. During his four years at Look, Kubrick covered an immense amount of subjects in an astonishing variety of styles. He did many celebrity portrait stories, for example, this is one about the actor Montgomery Clift, and here's one about the New York cartoonist Peter Arnault. He did funny animal stories, here's some Afghan hounds going off to paint the town red. He covered swinging jazz nightlife in clubs, or a day in the life of a shoeshine boy. But what linked all of these assignments was his natural ability as an astute observer of human behaviour. And even within the relatively conservative confines of Look magazine, he managed wherever possible to break out of those restrictions and sneak in a disquieting subject matter. One of the best examples of this is a story he had published in 1947 called Life and Love on the New York Subway, a six-page article featuring 29 photographs taken by Kubrick when he just rode the subway photographing as much as he possibly could over a two-week period using only available light. This series is extraordinary for a number of reasons, not just because Kubrick was only 19 years old, when he took the photographs. New York City subway photography is an entire genre by now, but back then in the mid-40s, it was far, far rarer, and Kubrick's was certainly, definitely one of the earliest that was ever done, and certainly one of the earliest that was ever published. And at the time, it must have seemed really quite revelatory. Just like his candid shots taken in a dentist's waiting room, Kubrick is great at capturing people lost in thought or worry. And hey, just take a look at this woman here on the right. I bet you she's also got a toothache. Now if you know anything about the history of street photography, then you'll probably know that the great Walker Evans did an almost identical project where he went round photographing people on the subway not just for two weeks, but for three solid years, between 1938 and 1941, when he took 600 photographs by painting his camera black, hiding it under his coat, and then focusing on the passengers sat opposite him. It's worth noting that Evans was accompanied on many of these subway photo rides by the equally great photographer, Helen Leavitt. In fact, here is a photo of Helen Leavitt taken by Walker Evans on the subway. Unfortunately, I can't find a matching photo of Evans by Leavitt taken on the subway, which is a huge shame. And so to make up for that, I'm just going to show you this great photo which I've used before of Evans, not on the subway, but with a curtain on his head, which I've only just recently discovered was actually taken by Helen Leavitt. Anyway, when they were together on a train, Evans used Leavitt as a kind of living distraction aid, so they would talk, and people wouldn't realise that Evans was also taking photographs. Kubrick's project came six years later on, and he used a slightly different technique. He didn't hide his camera up under his coat. He kept it out on display, but he hid his shutter release in a brown paper bag, so people wouldn't realise that he was taking photographs of them. And,you know, there's a massive similarity between some of Kubrick and Evans' photographs. Look, who took this one? Kubrick or Evans? Or this one? In fact, some of them are actually by Helen Leavitt, who also took photos in the subway at the same time as Evans, but because she was doing it in exactly the same way, and probably with the same camera on the same film stop, it's very difficult to tell. But I think overall, Kubrick's work is actually better than both Evans' and Leavitt's, and I'll try to explain why. First of all, Kubrick didn't know about this earlier project. Evans didn't actually publish his subway photos until 1966, when about 80 or so of them were collected in a volume called Many Accords, with a forward by James Asia. So Kubrick wasn't copying or even consciously following in either Evans' or Leavitt's footsteps. He was just doing his own thing, but a few years later. But the real thing that sets them apart is the scope of Kubrick's vision or ambition. Evans' book is more like a conceptual art piece. Every single photo in Many Accords, apart from this final great shot of a blind beggar in the centre of the carriage, is identically framed. They all look like this because Evans only took his photos while sitting opposite his subject. So there's a uniformity of vision here. The entire book is just single or double head shots. Now contrast that with Kubrick. He clearly didn't just sit opposite people and snap away. He was all over the carriage, working the space, getting a real variety of shots, like any good photographer working for a magazine would, or like any good film director would. He's getting coverage. So like Evans, he has seated passengers. There's a woman picking her nose. But then he also has crowd photos like this one, which could almost be a Robert Frank or a William Klein shot. He gets people's backs. He looks down the carriage, and he's out on the platform looking in. He's everywhere. But the other great thing about Kubrick's work on the subway is that he captured an edge and a real flavour of both the humour and menace of New York in them. He did this by doing half of his shooting on the subway between the hours of midnight and 6am. So Kubrick got people collapsed and fast asleep on the subway, catching people on their way home tired and often drunk when their guards were down or when they were unconscious. I love this exhausted family on their way back from some fancy event and look at the boneless sleeping bloke further along the road. Magic. Kubrick was instinctively drawn towards the grimy and the dark and not all of these photos would have made it into the prim pages or the relatively prim pages of Look. Although they did publish this one of a sleeping man possibly with toothache again and this game of footsie. But they never included these slightly riskier shots. But Kubrick took them anyway. Even at 19, he was seeing what he could get away with and starting to push at boundaries. Although it's worth pointing out that these photos aren't exactly what they seem. The woman here is not some random drunk commuter but in fact she's Kubrick's first wife Tobinette who he married when he was just 19. So the same year that he shot this story there's a whole sequence of his new wife in the embrace of another man for a setup that never made it into the magazine. Maybe that's why they only stayed married for three years until 1951. Now the problem that I've got with this film is that even though Kubrick only worked for Look for about four years he was so prolific and there are so many great photos that I'm in real danger of spreading myself too thin if I try and include too many. So I'm only going to focus on the ones that appeal to me and the ones that I think also help place him in context against other photographers. But that means there's no time for me to look at say this photograph which is yet another photograph he took of a woman picking her nose or this great photo in a prosthetic leg factory. And equally I haven't really got time to look at this shot of people watching a fashion show in 1949 or this fantastic sequence he took of other people just looking up and watching. Kubrick's instinct for faces and what makes an interesting shot is uncanny in someone so young. And again here you can see the future film director in him. He's always getting reaction shots. He's setting up a narrative. What are they looking at? Maybe it's this. Or it could be this. The final photograph which we don't really have time to look at but which I want to include anyway is this one which is from a story he shot for Look about Columbia University in 1948 which I love because it's a seemingly simple image that's just loaded with peril. This librarian or student could fall at any time possibly squashing Kubrick and his camera in the process. Also and this might seem a bit of a stretch but Kubrick was a huge fan of the pioneering Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein. And here for no real reason is a photograph of Eisenstein pretending that he has a penis shaped like a giant cactus or a giant cactus shaped like a penis. I'm not sure which. And one of Eisenstein's most famous film sequences is this one from the 1925 epic Battleship Potemkin which takes place on the Odessa steppes which I'd like to think that Kubrick is invoking but obviously for the readership of Look so he can't have blood and babies in peril on the steppes so he has to settle for a librarian and a pile of books instead. But maybe that's going too far. Although remember I did say at the start that Kubrick invites outlandish theories. What's certain though is that that photo features on the cover of one of two really good books about Kubrick's photography that you can get which is this one which is called Stanley Kubrick Drama and Shadows Photographs 1945-1950 by Rainer Krohn and this is a really good fairly comprehensive book with nice big prints in it but it's getting hard to get hold of now and getting a bit pricey fear not because there is a new book which is this one by Taschen which is called Through a Different Lens Stanley Kubrick's Photographs and this is really good and very very affordable and you know has got a lot of stuff in it probably got more in it than the other one and looks at everything in chronological order although if you'll allow me a small moan one of the reasons that this film has taken so bloody long to do is because Taschen originally said they were going to publish this last August but then they kept on delaying it and delaying it and delaying it and it didn't actually come out until late December and if I'm going to continue my moan with Taschen for a little bit here it's interesting because they have become the sort of curators of all things Kubrick in book form so in addition to this book they also sell this one which is the Stanley Kubrick Archives which is also very affordable although you can get this in two different sizes you can get this which retails for about 20 quid you can get a bigger version of it which is about 75 quid but both this book and this one I think only exist to try and hook you in and get you addicted because what Taschen really want to do is they want to sell you their or push on you their really high grade Kubrick fare like some kind of drug addict they want to get you addicted and then they want you to have to sell a house or a kidney or a child or all three in order to be able to afford this which is their limited edition box set on the Shining which they describe as not just a book but as a book and an ephemera set whatever the fuck that is full of behind the scene stuff you can't see anywhere else and remarkably it's sold out despite it costing two and a half thousand pounds that's right two and a half thousand pounds although to be fair it is the size of a small hotel room and it is over two thousand pages long so maybe it's good value I don't know anyway let's get back to looking at some of Kubrick's other photographs and some other photographers he can be compared to now in 1946 Look published a relatively small photographic story by Kubrick called How a Monkey Looks to People and How People Look to a Monkey just to be clear by the way this first photo of How a Monkey Looks to People wasn't taken by Kubrick it was taken by the famous animal photographer Camilla Uwe Koffler I hope I pronounced her name right and here is a photo of her about to take a photo of a toucan eating a cherry tomato or a grape I can't be sure but anyway all the subsequent photos of people were taken by Kubrick from a monkey's point of view through the bars of a cage and this really is Kubrick in his element people watching incidentally and I'm getting a bit off topic again but solve it this little photo story taken through the bars of a cage always reminds me of one great scene in Spartacus which Kubrick directed 14 years later in 1960 Spartacus was the first and only big studio movie that Kubrick did effectively as a director for hire after Kirk Douglas who was the star and producer fired the original director Anthony Mann after just one week of filming here's a photo of Kubrick on the set of Spartacus with not one not two but three stills cameras around his neck I'd love to think that he was taking this amazing photograph with them which shows his ingenious way to get battlefield extras to move into the correct positions in between takes by numbering each casualty but I'm getting distracted again Spartacus famously wasn't a particularly pleasant experience for Kubrick He didn't have final cut and it was the only film in which he never had final cut but it does contain this one little scene which is one of the best in the entire film precisely because of what it doesn't show In a feature that's all about spectacle and blood and epic scale Kubrick holds back and stays focused on the faces of the gladiators waiting and watching their fellow slaves fight to the death For some reason that scene always puts me in mind of these photos taken 14 years earlier and also through the bars of a cage But that wasn't really the point I wanted to make about this photo This series always puts me in mind of another photographer who is very rarely mentioned in the same breath as Kubrick but I think there are very interesting parallels and contrasts to look at with them both and that's Gary Winogrand So they don't often get compared but it's worth considering a few interesting details Kubrick and Winogrand were exact contemporaries They were both born in the same year 1928 They were both born to Jewish families They both grew up in the Bronx and they both supported themselves by doing photography for publications and magazines Winogrand was nowhere near as precocious as Kubrick but he started working for magazines and publications when he was in his early and mid-twenties not his teens But what's really interesting to me is that just as Kubrick and Walker Evans tackled subway commuters in similar yet different styles So Kubrick and Winogrand tackled the zoo in similar yet contrasting ways although in like a reversal of my earlier example I'll try and explain what the hell I'm on about In this zoo story Kubrick takes the role of Walker Evans in that he sets up one shot and that's all he's interested in the faces of the people looking at the monkeys But Winogrand's first book which was called The Animals and published in 1969 is all about him roaming around the zoo getting people and animals from as many angles as possible not confining himself to one spot like Kubrick Incidentally this is Winogrand's most famous zoo photograph but it's not included in The Animals Why? Who knows? But here's a photo of Winogrand just moments after taking that famous photograph which was snapped by Todd Papa George who was accompanying him out that day But Winogrand apparently shoved him out of the way to get the shot and all the while smoking to boot And one more thing Earlier on I showed you that photo of Kubrick on set with three cameras around his neck Remember this one? Well in this one Winogrand's got two cameras See there's this one here which was loaded with colour film Recently this photo has come to light Colour shot of the monkey-carrying couple Although now one of the monkeys is down on the floor Once again I'm getting distracted Obviously Kubrick and Winogrand have very different aesthetics Winogrand's work is all about capturing the chaos of modern life and even becoming part of that chaos himself Whereas Kubrick increasingly moved away from any kind of documentary recording and turned into someone who would construct reality for himself and work on repetition within films and torturing his actors until he got exactly what he wanted But I think it's always worth bearing in mind that they started off from a very similar place Born just miles and months apart from each other Now I don't think Kubrick and Winogrand ever met each other But there was another famous New York photographer who Kubrick definitely hung out with in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s and early 1950s and that was Diane Arbus Again they were both New York Jews from similar backgrounds Arbus was five years older than Kubrick but like him she was instinctively drawn to dark subjects and interesting unconventional characters And again they both supported themselves by doing magazine work while simultaneously developing more personal projects Again let's play a game here where we have to decide who took which photograph Arbus or Kubrick Let's start with two relatively easy ones Who took these Kubrick or Arbus Now it gets a bit harder What about these two And finally these two which is almost impossible One of these is the human pincushion Ronald Harrison photographed by Diane Arbus in 1961 The other is an anonymous circus performer with quite frankly the most worrying looking pierced nipples I've ever seen at the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1948 Incidentally Look magazine declined to publish this photo reasoning probably quite rightly that it might cause some of their more conservative readers to choke on their breakfast pancakes So they were definitely drawn to similar subjects but the most famous overlap between Arbus and Kubrick has to do with the shining You really don't have to look far online to discover that this photo taken by Diane Arbus of Kathleen and Colleen Wade seven-year-old identical twins in Rossell, New Jersey in 1967 is widely accredited with being the direct inspiration for the nightmare-inducing grady twins in The Shining Remember that's my Christmas present someone's going to buy me, isn't it And you know I'm not doubting this link at all Kubrick definitely went to see Arbus' posthumous retrospective show in New York City in 1972 where this photograph was on display And in Stephen King's original book the two girls are not twins And so he's deliberately changed them to be identical twins And again I'm not denying Arbus' influence here But it is worth noting that Kubrick had a long-existing fascination with twins that predates both Arbus' 1967 photo and The Shining And it's also interesting to me because it signals the start of his abandonment of stills photography and his obsession and love affair with the moving image Now in 1949 Look published an eight-page twenty-photo essay by Kubrick called Prize Fighter about a young 24-year-old middleweight boxing contender called Walter Cartier Kubrick was a real boxing fan and did several other boxing stories over the years for Look But even by his standards the amount of work he put into this one story was extreme Apparently he shot over a thousand images which were whittled down to just twenty published photos Incidentally and I'm only going to include this very, very quickly because it's something that I only found out while doing the research for the film In 1954 Gary Winogrand who was at the time also a young press photographer was commissioned by Sports Illustrated to do a story on another up-and-coming young boxer called Nick Biondi Here he is eating a meal in this postcard taken by Winogrand with his parents and he looks like he's got a broken nose there too And here he is with his trainer and this is a crowd shot from a fight So that's zoos and boxers that Winogrand and Kubrick both covered But anyway back to Kubrick's Prizefighter story You can see there's some great gritty boxy sports shots here But that's not what I'm particularly interested in The thing that sets this story apart is that Walter Cartier had an identical twin brother called Vincent and they did almost everything together And this clearly is a major reason why Kubrick shot the crap out of this story He even took them down on the subway and photographed them there together Visually twins are fascinating So this training shot becomes truly intriguing as it's like Walter is training or fighting with himself It's like a mirror and it makes you do a genuine double take throughout the story to see this person duplicated and repeated all the time Kubrick recognized the value of this so much so that two years after this story was published in Look he made his first documentary film a 12-minute short called The Day of the Fight which was once again all about Walter and Vincent Cartier and even starts with the twins in bed together You can watch the whole of this film up on YouTube but what's really interesting to me about it is that it features two of Kubrick's obsessions Boxing obviously but also that boxing is secondary to his other love which is watching people waiting and the tension that arises from that waiting It's like his earlier story on the dentist's waiting room all over again Remember this film is called The Day of the Fight and it starts at 6 a.m. when the twins wake up and then Kubrick films them throughout the day as they wait and prepare for Walter's big fight which doesn't take place until much later in the evening So we see them walking the streets together going to mass at church even feeding their pet spaniel scraps from the table The vast majority of the film is focused not on boxing at all but on the twins and waiting all done with the knowledge that there is violence and confrontation looming but the first punch isn't even thrown until ten minutes in and I'm not going to give away the result You'll have to watch the film yourself It's also worth mentioning that a few years later when Kubrick made what is in effect his second short feature film Killer's Kiss in 1955 this was also about a boxer although this time not the twin and the film's titles unfold over a long shot of the boxer doing what that's right anxiously waiting and smoking at a train station Now what must seem like several years ago I started this segment by talking about Kubrick's affinity and association with Diane Arbus and their mutual interest in twins but there's another area that they were both that they both overlap on and that's their interest in the circus and circus performance I've already shown you Kubrick's terrifying saggy pierced nipple bloke that didn't make it into look but quite a few of Kubrick's other circus stories did make the cut This is a rare early color photo of a clown called Lou Jacobs from 1948 which is worryingly sinister if you ask me and there's also this brilliantly composed high wire act photo which I just love Kubrick's compositional abilities are simply phenomenal There's so many of his great circus photos that it would be possible to fill up the next ten minutes with them but I'm going to stop with this photo which is in the Fiden book but not the Taschen one and annoyingly isn't properly labeled but I'm fairly certain that the dwarf in this picture is none other than Jimmy Armstrong Now if you've watched episode 14 of Show and Tell which is on dwarves in street photography you'll know that Jimmy Armstrong is probably one of the most famous photographed dwarves of all time He was the subject of Bruce Davidson's iconic photos from Magnum that he took in 1958 and here is both Davidson and Armstrong together But as I revealed he was also photographed by Andre Cortes in 1959 and also by another photographer that is very important to Stanley Kubrick and that is Arthur Fellick otherwise known as Weegee So here is one of Weegee's photos of Jimmy Armstrong which was taken sometime in the early to mid 1940s probably before Kubrick's But beyond this one coincidence of a dwarf photo Weegee and Kubrick had quite a lot in common If you don't know about Weegee then once again I urge you to go back and watch Show and Tell episode 13 on Bad Luck in Street Photography where I talk at length about his amazing career and him and Kubrick had quite a lot in common Once again they were both New York Jews and Weegee had a career working for magazines photographing crime scenes and for a while between the sort of mid 1930s and mid to late 1940s early 1950s he became one of the most famous photographers in America or the world done almost exclusively by photographing crime scenes His book Naked City which was published in 1945 is a seminal work and made Weegee incredibly famous as I just said and he was a real influence on Kubrick Some of Kubrick's early work like these shots are clearly heavily influenced by Weegee and the two photographers occasionally bumped into each other around the city and would have known each other as friends Remember Look Magazine wasn't a bloodthirsty publication so Kubrick wasn't listening in on a police scanner to radio reports and then rushing off to the scene of a murder or a crime like Weegee was but he did produce this very Weegee-esque photo story on the world's most escape-proof paddy wagon which is you can see here alongside a shoe advert which featured this utterly bizarre yet brilliant shot and in 1947 Kubrick even got to go along and photograph the production of a feature film shot on location around New York City by Jules Dassin called Naked City which was very, very, very loosely based around Weegee's book So here we have on location photos by a young Kubrick who would later go on to become a celebrated filmmaker photographing a film based on another photographer's book It's a very tremendously meta-collection of images Here's Kubrick's photograph of the film director Jules Dassin and here's Kubrick's photo of Weegee up a ladder Weegee had been employed by the film's producers as a technical advisor for $100 a week and also covering the shoot And then here's a photo of Kubrick behind the scenes that I would like to think is by Weegee but honestly I don't know if that's true or not What is true though is that Kubrick used this occasion to take this great Weegee-esque photo of a crowd of people watching the filming Weegee was always just as interested in the crowds that he came across at crime and accident scenes as the crimes themselves And I really feel that this is a lesson Kubrick learnt from him And we've seen it several times already in the way he is obsessed with the faces of waiting people people standing around In this case literally waiting for the drama to occur And this photo always puts me in mind of another one of Weegee's most famous images Their First Murder Although in that case this crowd was trying to get a glimpse of the real murder But in Kubrick's photo the crowd are waiting around to get a glimpse of actors who are then going to pretend to be involved in a murder Albeit a murder that is loosely based on one of Weegee's real photographs You got that But even though this was a very brief assignment for Kubrick And actually it was never actually published in the book This wasn't the first time that the two photographers Kubrick and Weegee featured on the same set of a movie together Once he left Stills Photography and became a film director Kubrick's rise was really rather rapid He made The Killing in 1956 And then Paths of Glory the following year in 1957 For a short while it looked as if the next film he would make would be to direct Marlon Brando in a western called One-Eyed Jacks And developments went far enough with that production that Kubrick was on record as talking to Brando about who they should get to do the behind-the-scenes photos And the photographer Kubrick wanted was no less than Henri Cartier-Bresson Kubrick thought that this would appeal to Brando's vanity to have the acknowledged humanist master photographer observe him at work and would be priced as publicity But apparently the suggestion upset Brando which seems to have been a very easy thing to have done who complained that he wouldn't want to be photographed by a great artist like Henri Cartier-Bresson as he wouldn't feel comfortable telling him to split when he didn't want his photo taken Anyway Kubrick soon got fired from the project which Brando ended up directing himself And here's some photos of him doing just that Taken not by Henri Cartier-Bresson And in fact I can't find out who did take them But it certainly wasn't Stanley Kubrick Anyway So after Piles of Glory in 1957 Kubrick made Spartacus a huge studio movie in 1960 And two years later in 1962 he made Lolita with Peter Sellers adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's best-selling novel Quick fun fact The iconic poster photo of Sue Leon as Lolita on the movie poster was not taken by Stanley Kubrick But by the photographer he had hired for the shoot who was called Bert Stern Now Bert Stern another New York Jewish photographer was just a couple of years younger than Kubrick And Kubrick and Stern met where? That's right at Look Magazine when Stern started in the mailroom there when Kubrick was their star teenage photographer And there's a photo that Stern took of Kubrick when both of them were probably in their teens Stern had a truly amazing career of his own And one day I might even do an entire show and tell about him But the reason he got this job on Lolita was that he was the last photographer to spend time photographing Marilyn Monroe who died in 1962 the same year that Lolita came out And now look again at his photos of Sue Leon They are deliberately designed and styled to invoke the image of Monroe Kubrick always knew the value of publicity Anyway coming back to Ouija finally Kubrick's next film after Lolita was made in 1964 And also starred Peter Sellers This time playing several different roles in the brilliant nuclear war satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Start Worrying And Loved the Bomb And for this shoot Kubrick employed Ouija as his behind-the-scenes cameraman or technical advisor And this was quite a charitable act of Kubrick because by the mid-1960s Ouija had sort of fallen on hard times really He wasn't doing much work And he died just four years later in 1968 So for Kubrick to reach out to him and offer him this job when he could have had a pic of any other behind-the-scenes photographer was, like I said really quite generous And it paid off in a number of unexpected and fascinating ways First of all Ouija took some lovely behind-the-scenes photos of the cast and crew Here's several different shots of Kubrick in the act of directing Or here you can see him making a sly reference to his previous film by calling a nuclear bomb liter and painting those distinctive sunglasses on it And here's a photo of Peter Sellers first of all inhaling some nasal decongestant when he was in character as the U.S. President Merkin Muffley And then here in this fantastic shot of the eponymous Dr. Strangelove himself And if you've ever seen the film you'll know that Strangelove is a German emigre with a very distinctive accent But how did Sellers come up with that accent for his character? Well, you can hear from the great man himself when you take a look at this clip from the 1964 Steve Allen show I was stuck with the accent I didn't want to do just a sort of a normal sort of English, broken German accent thing So on the set was a little photographer from New York who was a very cute little fella called Ouija You must have heard of him And he had a little voice like this He used to walk around the set talking like this most of the time He used to go on and say I'm looking for a girl with a beautiful body and a sick mind And I got an idea I was really stuck with it And I thought, you know Ouija used to get all this stuff Everything He used to have great big enlarged lenses on the front of the camera And a cross over his head And he'd just get ready to do it And Stanley would say Not now, Ouija He'd say, OK And move it all away, you see I thought If I put a German accent on top of that You see, Linus suddenly got this thing you know, there that's going up here and said that And so I got into Dr. Strangelove So really, it's Ouija I don't know if he knows it But So that's right Dr. Strangelove is directly inspired by Ouija or at least Ouija's voice which is quite a turn of events and a great bit of film trivia But that's not the only thing that we have to thank Ouija for Because his presence on set provides us with the only surviving images of what was to be the film's final scene Now, spoiler alert If you've seen Dr. Strangelove you'll know that it ends or very close to the end with the fantastic iconic image of Slim Pickens as Major King Kong riding a nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull cowboy as it plummets towards Earth But that wasn't the original ending The film was meant to end with everyone in the war room the Russians and the Americans all becoming involved in a enormous custard pie fight which they filmed for five days and apparently used up a thousand pies a day But then what happened was that Kubrick went and test screened it and it went down terribly and then John F. Kennedy got shot and so they scrapped it altogether But the only surviving images of this custard pie fight are Ouija's behind-the-scenes photos which you can see here I love this one of Kubrick demonstrating exactly how he wanted a pie to be thrown And the whole thing seems to have gone totally over the top with people on each other's shoulders and just chaos Although I think my favourite photo is one not taken by Ouija at all but this which is just two camera geeks Ouija showing Kubrick the special underwater housing for his rolliclegs which obviously also helped protect it against custard pies Now, I could just keep wanging on about Stanley Kubrick for hours and hours but I'm going to stop because this is going to take me a huge amount of time to edit But I do want to end on one last Stanley Kubrick story and this is honestly true, believe me So a few months ago I posted a short film up on YouTube which you can see here which was the first thing that I ever made called I Was Catherine the Greatest Stable Boy And it was literally the first thing I ever did in the film industry beyond being a script reader and a runner And I had absolutely no clue what I was doing when I made it Here are some photos of me back when I still had some hair directing the film And those are some of my mates dressed as Cossacks And yeah, if you want to watch it it's up here on YouTube and only four minutes long Now, why am I mentioning all this? What the hell has any of this got to do with Stanley Kubrick by who you ask? Well, I'll explain My film I Was Catherine the Greatest Stable Boy is obviously all about Catherine the Great of Russia the Empress of Russia who was rumoured to have died while having sex with a horse So we needed to find some very opulent settings for filming this production We needed a throne room or a ballroom And we also needed a stable block which was quite an unusual mix of locations to get And so one day my producer and I went on a location scouting journey And we were in sort of just outside of North London up towards a place called Harbin And we were driving along the road And we saw this very opulent looking gate house And through the miracle of Google Maps I can now show you exactly what we saw So we were driving along And we saw this gate house here And then we drove in through those initial gates And then we went up this drive a bit further And there we came to a barrier with an intercom system So we got out of the car And we could see just beyond the barrier there was a big house And we thought to ourselves Well maybe they'll have a ballroom And possibly a stable So I went up And there was an intercom And I pressed on the buzzer And we waited for a little bit And didn't get any result And so we were about to go And I thought I'll press again So I pressed it once more And the buzzer sort of crackled into life And this American voice came over the intercom And it said Yeah, what do you want And I sort of said Well, hi, we're here We're looking to make a short film I deliberately didn't mention the horse sex scene Because I thought that I would hold that back If we actually got in And they showed us around Anyway, so I explained what we were after And it just went dead Nothing happened So we waited for a minute And I pressed the buzzer again And I said hello And there was no answer And then just as we were about to go I pressed once more And I got a voice And it came over It was again the same American voice And it said Look, I've told you once already Fuck off And we were both a bit astonished And I was about to get into an argument Over the intercom And say well you haven't Told me anyway Anyway, the producer grabbed me And dragged me away And got back into the car And we drove back down To the gate house And as we were leaving This woman came out And she came out of the car And asked what we were doing And we explained And said about the buzzer and everything And she started laughing And said oh yeah So you've met Stanley then And it turned out That this house That we somehow managed to stumble across Was Kubrick's own house At Charles Whitberry Manor Where he'd lived since 1978 So Stanley Kubrick Told me to fuck off Which I'm very, very proud of Incidentally, one of the reasons That Kubrick was so brusque To unexpected callers Was that because During the filming of Barry Lyndon in Ireland He had received an unannounced visit From the IRA Who basically told him to fuck off Or else he would be blown up And so Kubrick left immediately And finished the filming In England and Germany So yeah He didn't take kindly to people Unexpectedly ringing his bell And asking them If they could come in And have a nose around his house So that's about that And there's just one other last point I want to make About Stanley Kubrick Which I thought of While I was making this And that is this I don't know of another photographer Regardless of how young he was When he made all this work But I don't know of another photographer Whose entire photographic era Is effectively all jobs for hire As far as I know There's no images Within Kubrick's archive That are purely personal They were all done on assignment You know even the first one Which he took of that newspaper vendor Was done intending to go and sell it And this I think is quite extraordinary Most photographers that I can think of Either have some kind of overlap Between their personal And their commercial work You know Elliot Erwitt did a lot of stuff While he was out on assignment And he mixed and matched There's also this great book By Jeff Merlstein Which is his second book Called No Title Here Which he took a lot of the images That were in this book I think I'm correct in saying Whilst he was on assignment For magazine work But then he also has His very personal stuff as well And then there's photographers Like for example I don't know Vivian Mayer Who only has personal work She had no commercial work at all No jobs or anything like that at all But Kubrick is probably The only person I know of Who's a famous photographer Who as far as I know There's no personal work at all And I think that's fascinating Because there's you know Even though there's so many books And films and documentaries And like I said doctoral theses Is being written about Kubrick There's also a sense That he's a bit of a mystery That if you try and get close to him If you go up to his house And ring his buzzer He'll just keep the barrier down Until you spark off And I think that's a fascinating thing This you know Pored over lorded master But no one can really Try and figure out What makes him tick Because there's no personal work Anyway I'm starting to ramble I'm going to shut up My name's Tim Lizzie Thank you very very much for watching I'll try and do another one of these Quite soon Also if you get a chance Please buy the book You know it's You buy the book It means that I can then Go and buy more books And then I can make more films like this So it's the cycle of life Anyway that's it I'm going to shut up I'm going to edit now Thanks a lot for watching See you again soon Bye