Gotham…
In the late 1940’s, before he found fame as a filmmaker, a teen-aged Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look Magazine, shooting around Manhattan (and often working alongside Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee). The Museum of the City of New York has over 8,000 of his photos in their collection– at once a window on post-war New York and an early peek at the aesthetic that we’d all come to recognize in Dr. Strangelove and Clockwork Orange (and, if less directly, in 2001 and The Shining).
Read the backstory (and see more snaps) at Gothamist, here and here.
Kubrick in his days as a photographer for LOOK
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As we mutter “redrum,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Henry James returned to the United States for the first time in 25 years. The son of theologian Henry James, Sr. and brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James was raised on both sides of the Atlantic. After finishing Harvard Law School (and deciding that he preferred writing fiction to legal briefs), he left the U.S. for France, where he lived briefly, then the U.K., where he settled and wrote the works on which his reputation rests: Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors. After his return, James worked mainly on the “New York Edition” of his works and on his autobiography.
James’ work was a break from the Romantic tradition embodied in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray; indeed, with William Dean Howells, George Eliot, and Stephen Crane, he pioneered the Realist novel.
