Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

The lights are all blinking red.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Let me file that under fuck it.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Stanley Kubrick was a Photojournalist

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41Comments

  1. 1.

    biff diggerence

    Yes. And the precision required for still photography shows up in his film work. Think of the hotel scene in The Shining, the shot of the lobby, or the table scene in Clockwork. Geometrically flawless.

  4. 4.

    Amir_Khalid

    I bookmarked Paul Krugman’s blog quite a while back. After this new New York Times paywall came down, I notice that, when I go there from my bookmark, I don’t get the bit of cruft obscuring the page — which I do with other NYT content once I hit the 20 article/month limit. I dunno, is it supposed to work this way? Or is it just the half-arsedness of the paywall in action?

  5. 5.

    Montysano

    Nice work, but not great. The photos are ultra-contrasty, with not much gray, and have some focus/sharpness issues. I’m more of a fan of Salgado, whose expression of light and use of grain are pure genius.

    As someone who still shoots film and thrashes about in a dark room, I’m a lover of (properly used) grain, which is something that digital can’t approach. And you kids get off my damn lawn, etc. etc.

  6. 6.

    Legalize

    Looking at anything created by Kubrick’s eye always makes me say “ahhhhh.” He is the master.

  7. 7.

    Amir_Khalid

    about the photo. It seems to me like Kubrick (or his camera) was standing on the train track when he shot that. Please tell me I’m wrong.

  9. 9.

    cleek

    the perspective in that pic (the roof lights, especially) makes me think the whole thing needs to be rotated about 3deg CCW – even though the two people in the center are perfectly vertical as-is. disorienting.

  10. 10.

    jibeaux

    One thing I like about this blog is that the ads are for some incomprehensible right wing thing, “gold delivered to my door”, yarn, and TOMS.

    Targeted marketing — ur doin it halfassed.

    Anyone ever gotten the TOMS wedges, though? Mine are in the mail. I got the linen flats last year and I can’t say they held up terribly well to the elements — definitely an indoor shoe — but they were very, very comfy. Like slipper comfy.

  11. 11.

    Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther

    It’s been so long since I spent any real time in the comments…. But time, it makes the heart grow fonder, non?

    Also too: That photograph is wicked. I would put that above my desk in a heartbeat.

  13. 13.

    Roger Moore

    Yah, Kubrick clearly cared a lot about the photographic/cinematographic side of his moviemaking. Another one that fanboys like to trot out is his use of an exotic Zeiss lens (50mm f/0.7!) originally developed for NASA’s moon program to shoot the candlelit scenes in Barry Lyndon without need for supplemental light. Those scenes really did turn out nicely, even if I’m not 100% sold on the movie as a whole.

  16. 16.

    Poopyman

    @Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: Haven’t found his blog yet, and I’d bet my employer would block it. The actual answer, of course, is “everybody”. But of course danimal was referring to the Brit–with–Irish–name–who–is–the–obsession–of–BJ–frontpagers.

  21. 21.

    Punchy

    JAPAN WITH ANOTHER 7.4 SHAKER….Tsunami warning already issued.

    Damn, when it rains, it pours.

  22. 22.

    Poopyman

    @4tehlulz: It was reported last week that the biggie last month put extra pressure on faults nearer Tokyo, so this should have been somewhat expected.

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne

    @cleek:

    G was a production major in film school and apparently Kubrick does just about everything “wrong” in his films when it comes to the classical rules of how you compose a shot. But because Kubrick made up his own rules and stuck to them, the films work anyway.

  26. 26.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Roger Moore: Not only that, he apparently had to pretty extensively rebuild that lens because it was designed as a still, not cine lens originally.

    And it looks like I’m not the only one to associate “2001” with acid. Or so I’ve heard.

  28. 28.

    Roger Moore

    @4tehlulz:
    It’s called an aftershock. You get them with earthquakes. It’s just that the earlier 9.0 was so damn big that even the aftershocks are big enough to qualify as serious quakes.

  30. 30.

    Roger Moore

    @Gin & Tonic:
    IIRC, the lens didn’t require that much work; it just needed a focusing mechanism that would let it focus close enough for nearby subjects instead of something that was effectively at infinity. The bigger work was on the camera, which had to be rebuilt because the lens had a radically shorter backfocus than a typical cinematographic lens. IIRC, a typical Panavision camera has a backfocus of something like 55mm to accommodate a reflex viewer while the Zeiss was around 7mm. Given the paper thin DOF of a lens that fast, he must have had a very good focus puller to get anything in focus without being able to see what he was shooting. He also had somebody build him a converter for the lens so he could use it for wider angle shots without losing any speed.

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @4tehlulz:
    Sorry, that came out wrong. I was responding to the “WTF” part, saying that aftershocks are a normal and reasonably predictable part of any earthquake. It didn’t mean to suggest that a 7.4 aftershock was something we should just laugh off.

  40. 40.

    debbie

    @biff diggerence:

    Yes. And the precision required for still photography shows up in his film work.

    I’m with you on that, but what some call precision, others would call chilly.

    With the exception of Eyes Wide Shut, every frame Kubrick shot was, I think, flawless. Someone should have noticed what he was doing with Cruise and Kidman and figured out he was ailing.

  41. 41.

    Xenos

    If you follow the link, there is a five frame sequence of wrestling which is quite astonishing for photjournalism. The composition and narrative flow of the pictures is quite an accomplishment for something worked out on the fly in the course of a wrestling match.

    I am not a huge fan of contact prints as finished work – I think there is a lot of tone depth that could have been brought out with proper darkroom work. But it sure makes me nostalgic for the smell of developer and stop solution.

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