Usually, when you hear a story about a teenager secretly filming strangers on the subway with a camera hidden under his coat, someone ends up getting arrested by transit cops.
But in this case, the teen happens to be Stanley Kubrick — and the photographs he took during his late-night strolls through the New York City subway system in 1946 have just surfaced for the first time in 80 years, 18 vintage prints buried in a four-million-photo archive recently acquired by Los Angeles gallery owner Daniel Miller.
“I was looking through the archives, and I found this little envelope hidden away with the word ‘Subway’ written on it,” Miller recalls. “I opened it up and thought, ‘This is really interesting stuff.’”
actually. These images are among Kubrick’s first known efforts behind the camera, which he took when he was just 16 or 17 years old, as an assignment for Look magazinewhich in 1945 named a future director of Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A space journey As the youngest photographer ever on his staff.
Of course, when Miller first opened the envelope, he had no idea about any of the above.
“I put the photos into ChatGPT to search and see who took them, and the photographer gave me exactly the wrong one,” he says. But Miller knew he was on to something, even if he didn’t know what it was yet, so he pressed on. “I sent them to a few people, other galleries, and with enough research we eventually found out – lo and behold – who had actually taken the pictures.”
In retrospect, it becomes blatantly clear who shot them. “Kubrick is story driven, and there is a lot of mystery behind these images,” Miller says. “What are these people really doing on the subway? Why does this guy tend to sleep? Or is he dead? He sure looks dead in the picture.”
“Kubrick must have been walking away, not knowing exactly what he was doing,” Miller continues. “On every roll of film, he probably got a shot or two that was interesting. But his editing choices — that’s what he was great about. That’s what he was known for. He would take a million takes.”
Miller points out that Kubrick’s early photographs also capture the long-lost mid-century era when diving into a hole in the ground for a subway ride was an exotic excursion. “People dressed up nicely to ride the subway,” Miller says. “You can see in the pictures that 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 photos for yourself, if you’re in New York. They are on display as part of a photography exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side. But you better hurry. All 18 shows have already been purchased for an undisclosed, high-priced price by an unnamed entertainment figure — “fairly well-known,” is all Miller will say about him — and will disappear from public view when the show ends on April 26. And perhaps for another 80 years.
