Stanley KubrickVisioni & Finzioni 1945-1950

Before he became a director, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine. Look published hundreds of his photographs over a period of five years, and Philippe Mather's book Stanley Kubrick At Look Magazine analyses this neglected period of Kubrick's career.

Stanley Kubrick: Visioni & Finzioni 1945-1950, the catalogue for an exhibition held in Italy in 2011, is Rainer Crone's fifth project examining Kubrick's photojournalism. Crone previously curated the exhibitions Still Moving Pictures and Stanley Kubrick: Fotografie 1945-1950, wrote the book Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows, and co-wrote an essay (Kubrick's Kaleidoscope) for the Stanley Kubrick exhibition catalogue.

Still Moving Pictures and Drama & Shadows offered a general overview of Kubrick's Look photos, though Crone has subsequently focused on a limited number of Kubrick's assignments. Thus, Fotografie 1945-1950 (co-written by Wouter Wirth) contains examples of a dozen photo-stories, and Visioni & Finzioni includes only nine of them. Crone's various books all offer beautiful full-page reproductions, though each publication recycles the same ever-diminishing selection of photographs. Also, Crone increasingly decontextualises the photographs: he retitles each photo-story, and provides no bibliographical details of the original Look titles or dates.

Kubrick's photographs were first reprinted in the Italian book Ladro Di Sguardi, and mostly recently in the Italian exhibition catalogue Stanley Kubrick: Fotografo. Kubrick's contact sheets can now be found at the Stanley Kubrick Archive, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Library of Congress.