Few people know that before he started making movies, Stanley Kubrick was a star photojournalist.
Six weeks after graduating from high school, Kubrick went to work for Look magazine the way other kids went to college.
Much later, Kubrick called his job at Look "a miraculous break." It taught him a lot about photography, but more that that, Look "gave me a quick education in how things happened in the world." In the summer of 1949, Look sent him to Chicago to shoot the pictures for a story by Irv Kupcinet. He brought back 40 rolls of film and a rare record of his own education as a filmmaker.
The Kubrick-Kupcinet story, "Chicago City of Contrasts," ran five pages, and included 11 pictures. Plenty of landmarks are here: State Street at night, dinner at the Pump Room, a South Side kitchen full of kids, a cheerful stripper in the middle of her act, a jazz club, a boxing match, the floor of the stock exchange, sleek commuter trains standing in the station, a bum eating lunch alone in a rubble-filled lot on the West Side....
