Never-Before-Seen Contact Sheets from Stanley Kubrick's First Movie and His Photographs of Middleweight Champ Rocky Graziano

From Photography to Film: Stanley Kubrick Enters the Ring

"Although Kubrick is regarded as the most critically and commercially successful photographer turned full-time feature filmmaker (and my personal favourite director), this mainstream acclaim might also be the reason his name rarely enters the discussion of the legendary New York-based photographers and their progressive contributions to avant garde and non-narrative filmmaking. This tradition includes Paul Strand (Manhatta, 1921), Rudy Burckhardt (The Pursuit of Happiness, 1940) Helen Levitt (In the Street, 1949), Ruth Orkin & Morris Engel (The Little Fugitive, 1953), William Klein (Broadway by Light, 1958) and Robert Frank (Pull My Daisy, 1959), among whose varying innovations include discrete handheld photography, examples of “life caught unawares,” and blurring lines between documentary and staged situations."[via Time Lightbox]

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/11/01/from-photography-to-film-stanley-kubrick-enters-the-ring/#ixzz2AzUcsvGk

Boxer Rocky Graziano (1919-1990), the greatest knockout artist in boxing history, photographed by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

I Highly recommend you watch this fascinating short film:

Thomas Rocco Barbella (1919 – 1990), better known as Rocky Graziano, was an American boxer. Graziano was considered one of the greatest knockout artists in boxing history, often displaying the capacity to take his opponent out with a single punch. He was ranked 23rd on The Ring magazine list of the greatest punchers of all time.

Rocky Graziano eating breakfast with his family.

Rocky Graziano playing cards with the boys

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999).Rocky Graziano, He’s a Good Boy Now. Man applying petroleum jelly to Rocky Graziano.1949-1950. 

Rocky Graziano exercising. 

Stanley Kubrick's "Day of the Fight" - Part 1

 Stanley Kubrick's Boxer photographs

Contact sheet from Kubrick's first film

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999). Walter Cartier – Prizefighter of Greenwich Village Walter Cartier during a fight.1948. 

Walter Cartier – Prizefighter of Greenwich Village Walter Cartier at a punching bag as Vincent Cartier and two other men watch.1948.

Walter Cartier eating in a restaurant and enjoying a good book. 1948

Walter Cartier was born in the Bronx in 1922. He started boxing with his brothers at an early age (his twin brother Vincent would later be his trainer) and after World War II gained prominence  in boxing circles in New York City.  At the time that Kubrick shot the LOOK story, Cartier was a 24-year old rising fighter, known for being a precise, smart, intense middleweight boxer.  The article accompanying the photographs says that if, “the big purses elude him another year, he plans to quit the ring and attend law school.”  But the big fights came and for years he was constantly on the cusp of becoming the middleweight champion.  As an obituary reads, “Cartier was that handsome Bronx knockout kid who sold tickets. Here was a special kind of a fighter–clean living, loved being a boxer and always kept himself in shape.”

Photographer Profile ~ Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1962. His first experience of photography, at the age of ten, was a Diane Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

As a teenager, he was part of a punk rock group called The Speedies that hit the New York scene in selling out shows all over town. Their hit song “Let Me Take Your Photo” proved to be prophetic to what Crewdson would become later in life. In 2005, Hewlett Packard used the song in advertisements to promote its digital cameras.

In the mid 1980s, Crewdson studied photography at SUNY Purchase, near Port Chester, NY. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Cooper Union, Vassar College, and Yale University where he has been on the faculty since 1993. He is now a professor at Yale University of the Arts.

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs usually take place in small town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. The photographs are shot using a large crew, and are elaborately staged and lighted. Working at a mind-boggling scale, Crewdson creates his highly crafted surreal images and are very cinematic. He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.

He apparently does everything in camera. Whatever it takes, he’ll build a set, create fog or rain. No cloning or CG is used to create these marvelously complex and compelling images. "a perfect moment "

Crewdson is represented in London at White Cube.

* please click on images for a larger view* recommended!

Yup that is Julianne Moore

"... I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire. "~ Crewdson

 

"Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures. "~ Crewdson

"The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst. " ~ Crewdson

 Six Feet Under cast

" I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there’s always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense… This is what drives you to the next picture. "~ Crewdson

"Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it’s instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth. " ~ Crewdson

"My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear. " ~ Crewdson

" All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I’m looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery. " ~ Crewdson

"…the photograph is still and frozen. From day one, I have been interested in taking that limitation and trying to find the strength in it—like a story that is forever frozen in between moments, before and after, and always left as a kind of unresolved question. " ~ Crewdson

On set with the Crewdson crew

Gregory Crewdson with his 8x10 camera

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters Trailer

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters Trailer from Benjamin Shapiro on Vimeo.

Check out this Aperture feature on Crewdson: http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/

The Speedies "Let Me Take Your Photo" (1979) 

with Gregory Crewdson!

I think he's on guitar,  but I'm not sure which one he is however. If anyone knows shoot me a message