Love of the paradoxical, of the oxymoron, of the ambiguous, is a key to the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick. While his films are known and appreciated by millions, few were aware until now that Kubrick was also a great photographer, in the years just after World War II. From 1945 to 1950 he worked, in fact, for the magazine Look, a popular weekly published in New York that aimed to document social life in post-war America. Rainer Crone, curator of this exhibition and expert in contemporary art, has discovered and studied over 12,000 photographs from this magazine, which had never before been critically or historically analyzed.

Today we are privileged to present a fascinating exhibition at Venetian Institute in Venice: not a simple collection of photographs by an artist, no matter how important, but a series of 'stories' told in images, forming a historically unique corpus through which we can read, in clearly identifiable form, the great film director's style and unique flair for 'story-telling'.

Specifically, this collection allows us to convincingly decipher some of the cultural references that were to become characteristic of Kubrick the film director as well; first among them, the theme of the artist's 'estrangement' from his own work of art. Kubrick lived in New York at the time when Brecht was encountering smashing success with his Three Penny Opera. And the future film director, of Jewish origin, surely recognized himself in the German cultural trend starting with Expressionism, and in the belief that a 'stylized' portrayal of reality could be much more striking that a 'natural' documentation. Already Proust had pointed out the particular nature of a photographic approach to reality, which becomes a sort of 'alienation' from it. In the light of Brecht's later work, this 'alienation' is then transformed, in Kubrick, into experimentation with his own emotions and experience before the fragment of reality framed by his camera. And lastly, we find the young Kubrick's burning interest in representing all that is blurred and uncertain, his fascination with what no longer exists, or has not yet come into existence. This was, moreover, a specific characteristic of the American culture that was then forcefully emerging in its originality and its attempt to break away from its European roots.