Usually, when you hear a story about a teenager secretly photographing strangers on the subway with a camera hidden under his coat, it ends with someone getting hauled off by transit cops.
But in this case, the teenager happened to be Stanley Kubrick — and the pictures he furtively snapped during late-night rides through the New York City subway system in 1946 have just surfaced for the first time in 80 years, 18 vintage prints that had been buried in a four-million-photograph archive recently acquired by Los Angeles gallery owner Daniel Miller.
“I was poking through the archive, and I found this little envelope hidden away that just had the word ‘Subways’ scrawled on it,” Miller recalls. “I opened it and thought, ‘This is really interesting stuff.’”
Courtesy of Daniel Miller
Indeed. The photos are among Kubrick’s earliest known efforts behind a camera, taken when he was just 16 or 17, as an assignment for Look Magazine, which, in 1945, hired the future director of Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey as the youngest photographer ever on its staff.
Of course, when Miller first opened the envelope, he had no clue about any of the above.
“I put the pictures into ChatGPT to search and figure out who took them, and it gave me the completely wrong photographer,” he says. But Miller knew he was onto something, even if he didn’t yet know what, so he persisted. “I sent it around to a few people, other galleries, and with enough research we eventually discovered — lo and behold — who the photos were actually taken by.”
In retrospect, it’s glaringly obvious who shot them. “Kubrick is so story-driven and there’s so much mystery behind these images,” says Miller. “What are these people really doing on the subway? Why is this guy leaned over sleeping? Or is he dead? He sure looks dead in the picture.”
Courtesy of Daniel Miller
“Kubrick must have just been flicking away, not really knowing exactly what he was doing,” Miller goes on. “For every roll of film, he probably got one or two shots that were interesting. But his selection in the editing — that’s what he was great at. That’s what he was known for. He would do a million takes.”
Kubrick’s early photos, Miller notes, also capture a long-lost mid-century era when dipping into a hole in the ground for a subway trip was something of an exotic journey. “People got dressed up nice to ride on the subway,” Miller says. “You can see in the pictures there are people actually talking to each other. Some people are even reading this weird thing called a newspaper.”
You can check out all 18 pictures for yourself, if you happen to be in New York. They’re on exhibit as part of the The Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side. But you’d better hurry. All 18 have already been purchased for an undisclosed, undoubtably hefty price by an unnamed entertainment figure — “fairly well known,” is all Miller will say about him — and will vanish from public view when the show ends on April 26. Possibly for another 80 years.
Courtesy of Daniel Miller
