Children Listening to a Reading of Books, 1947, the Bronx, by Stanley Kubrick

 

 

As he was born on July 26, 1928, had he not died fifteen years ago, Stanley would have turned eighty six years old today.  Prompted by an article in the usually useless New York Times, I was directed to a website set up by the Museum of the City of New York that displays all of the surviving photographs that he shot for LOOK Magazine during the five years he worked for them (beginning at the age of sixteen.)  The photographs shown here were made in 1947, and weren’t published in the magazine as far as I can ascertain.  As can be seen from the cutting, splicing, and marking on some of them, he was assembling them to some definite purpose before setting them aside.  It might be worth noting here that Kubrick was himself a notoriously unwilling student in school and frequently bored by what went on.  I’m assuming that these were taken at a primary school in his native Bronx neighborhood.