Look, January 18, 1949 / Stanley Kubrick as Photographer

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Get the cover to cover scan here! Big thanks to McCoy for his edit work on this issue.

A short detour from planned posts today, let's take a gander at a key issue of Look, a magazine often quickly dismissed as an also-ran competitor of Life though it was hugely successful in circulation and possessed in my opinion a fun and distinct flavor (a bit more sensational, more entertainment-oriented) from Life. Life debuted in November of 1936, and Look started with v01n02 in February of 1937, and PIC actually beat both of them off the block with its first issue in May of 1936. All of these magazines were on an over-sized paper stock and capitalized on printing advances that made the publication of photographs much more affordable, ushering in the photo-dominated slick magazine and the end of the golden age of illustration. Look was founded by Gardner "Mike" Cowles (Executive Editor of the Des Moines Register) and his brother John and began as a thinner magazine (44 pages) subtitled "The Monthly Picture Magazine" with very little text. The captions often told the story or the text would just be a paragraph or two, and there was no advertising whatsoever. The magazine was monthly for its first five issues but quickly moved to a bi-weekly format. In January of 1937, Time published an article describing the origin of Look and and its founders and gives a description of the first issue's sensational contents aimed, the article says a bit condescendingly, at a "lower, broader" audience than the fledgling Life. Doc Lomazow has a nice, big scan of the cover for this first issue over on his blog on a post here. Within weeks, demand for Look soared to over a million copies. Peak circulation was 7.75 million, and it was the second highest selling mag after Life and sold more copies than The Saturday Evening Post. In 1971 when it closed its doors, it still had a circulation of 6.5 million, not too shabby.

My man McCoy happens to have scanned one of the 1937 issues (August 3rd), and I'd be doing a disservice not to post it here in the conversation so that you can get a fuller picture of the magazine's early character.


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Get the cover to cover scan here! Thanks to McCoy for sharing the issue with us. All sorts of oddities in here - an elephant steps on a man's head, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini pay for babies, catching a polar bear, rope dancers, tidal waves, teaching the deaf to speak, what makes fighters punch drunk, a new treatment for freckles, April Fool joke becomes fashion rage, an extended pictorial on the rise of Gary Cooper, and much more...

But back to the 1949 issue, by which time the magazine has moved to a format that the modern reader is more familiar with at 100 pages, plenty of advertisements, some color(though on alternating qualities of paper stock), and articles more in-line with what we think of when we think of Life or other weekly magazines. If you plan on scanning any of this type of magazine, you'll most likely want to use an A4 scanner, as the pages are much too big to fit on a standard scanner, and merging two scans for each page is very labor intensive. Look, from what I've seen on eBay, isn't collected by too many folks. You can find issues fairly cheap there, and the circulation was so wide that it's one of the titles that you can sometimes find at flea markets and antique malls. It's not a magazine I go out of my way to collect (the cover design in later years is not very attractive in my opinion), but I do keep an eye out for issues with cool content. Like the publishers intended, the magazine has broad appeal, and readers today will find all sorts of interesting material in the historical and political issues of the day along with plenty of entertainment and lifestyle topics as well as great vintage advertising.

The indicia page for the January 18, 1949, issue:


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So, I picked this issue up, as you no doubt quickly deduced from the post title, because I'm a fan of Stanley Kubrick and was interested in seeing some of his early photographic work in context. Kubrick grew up with a dark room in his home and was only 16 when he sold his first photograph to Look. He joined the Look staff as a full-time photographer just as soon as he graduated from high school. Fans of his cinema will no doubt be unsurprised that he began his career as a photographer, and the extended article/pictorial in this issue "The Prizefighter" served as inspiration for his first film, "Day of the Fight," which also centers around the life of boxer Walter Cartier. Day of the Fight is public domain and available at archive.org or you can download and see some screencaps and a little more description here. Be warned, though, the video quality at archive.org (and on the other two much larger rips I've found on the web) is truly awful and detracts from enjoying the film. The little doc seems solid enough and would give him the name and footing he needed to further his career. I recently re-watched perhaps my favorite of his films The Killing and saw for the first time Paths of Glory, both films which already have him in great form just five years later. A friend mentioned to me that he wondered if Scorsese's Raging Bull was influenced by "Day of the Fight" and the Look pictorial, and I'd say you can see how the day to day details shown of Cartier's life might have influenced that later film. There are book-length collections of Kubrick's photos out there, and Look donated their photos to the Library of Congress, and there are about 100 Kubrick photos available online here for your viewing pleasure. Many of them are quite good, though some of the negatives seem to have deteriorated. Kubrick is a great example of one of the many luminaries who began their careers in American magazines. For your reading pleasure, "The Prizefighter":


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There are plenty of other neat articles in here, too, I'll put up a couple more articles I enjoyed. First, here's an article a Herbert Hoover commission on the size of government which might almost be considered quaint in light of 60 years of expansion, "Is Our Government Too Big" by William B. Arthur. It's right after the war, and Americans had a pretty positive view of Uncle Sam, so there's really not too much anti-government rhetoric in here, but you can tell there's some skepticism about the expanding role government was taking in our lives. I, like most Americans I'd guess, have mixed feelings about big government. It's certainly a tool for bettering society and checking wanton corporate behavior, but at the same time, the inefficiency and cost of it all can be maddening. The recent report that comes to mind is the one talking about all the layers of duplicate bureaucracy in the Dept. of Homeland Security (which I'd say we could just about do without altogether, I'm sure others would say things about entities I appreciate such as the DOE, etc). One thing for certain, though, rolling back government to the size of operations in the 19th century is an absolute pipe dream - at some point I feel like it's far healthier for the republic to adopt a mindset of management and responsibility for your government instead of viewing it as the enemy and that goes out to personages on both ends of the political spectrum...


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And here's an article on post-war Japan I found very interesting, "The Strange Case of MacArthur in Japan" by Hallett Abend. After reading much on WWII last year, this is an interesting look at Japan 4 years later, still having a very rough time of it. MacArthur is one of those figures in American History that gets almost deified by many, so I was surprised to see the critical stance the writer takes. In light of how quickly Japan would eventually recover and in light of some of our more recent attempts at nation-building, I've always thought of our work in Japan as ultra-successful; it's a subject I really ought to look into more, as I would suppose this was a critical period in the forging of a new way of life and a new national identity. The author seems to foreshadow coming events in Korea and is eminently concerned with the operations of communism in this faltering Japan, the Cold War is at the forefront of his concerns. Anyways, as usual, reading an old magazine has disturbed some of my pat ideas on History, so I'm inspired to do some digging on the subject. But here 'tis:


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And some little odds and ends I enjoyed, more on this stuff in the complete scan. Kiss Me Kate, Cole Porter makes a comeback.

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A fun ranking of stars' money-making power for 1948.

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From a nice article on Elizabeth Taylor. After ogling at the pics I was a little embarrassed to read she's only 16 here, oh my.

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In theaters now. I saw Yellow Sky last week and really enjoyed it. If not for the poor climax and aftermath, it'd be a classic.

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An article on women in homebuilding I enjoyed, as my stepmom has always been involved in my pop's homebuilding ventures.

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Schlitz...

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Buddy Rich!


Next time - back to our previously scheduled programme. How to scan pt.3, editing.