

c. 1946: The New York subway, by Stanley Kubrick - Thevet
http://mashable.com/2015/01/18/stanley-kubrick-photography/

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WildUtah
Look how well all those people are dressed, and in an era when a nice suit
cost ten times what it does today in relation to incomes.

What drove people to invest so much in looking nice and formal in public? I
wonder if it was the same force that kept people from destroying those nice
woven seat cushions -- they'd be in shreds today or stink of dust and
infestations like BART seats.

Anyway, I wouldn't dress up that nice for a job interview or a first date, but
regular working people are investing more than I would spend on a car to go
out in nice clothes every day. I don't understand what socioeconomic forces
drive that kind of commitment to the particular and narrow common good of a
well dressed public impression.

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stegosaurus
Clothing in general has become much cheaper, though. I can buy a new pair of
jeans for an hours' labour at UK minimum wage. A t-shirt for 1/3 of that.

A more relevant example than income, would be comparing the differential
between casual clothing and formal clothing.

One thing that always strikes me is that this clothing looks to be extremely
high quality compared to what is on offer today (except perhaps at the high
end). Some of those coats look fit to last a lifetime.

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bambax
Kubrick was an amazing photographer; his glory as a cinematographer eclipsed
his first career but that's too bad.

I too try to "record spontaneous action"; here's a series about tourists
taking selfies before the Eiffel Tower:

[http://smugmug.bambax.com/Street-
Scenes/Selfies/n-zMzRw/i-Ww...](http://smugmug.bambax.com/Street-
Scenes/Selfies/n-zMzRw/i-WwRwdWS/A)

What do you think?

~~~
leephillips
I think those are very good. And oh my, people are actually using those
selfie-sticks?

~~~
bambax
Thanks. Yes, they do, a lot. Even when they're not alone, they want to take a
picture of their whole party and they do it like that.

It used to be that you asked someone to take your picture with your camera,
but not anymore!

Tourists are self-reliant now. They're in a kind of bubble, they have their
own bottle of water, they don't ask for directions because they look it up on
their phone, etc.

Selfies are, fundamentally, PR; you're not shooting the Eiffel Tower, or even
a souvenir of the time when you were in Paris; you're showing off for your
friends, and you're in complete control of the frame, yourself, and even the
moment when the shutter is pressed.

What I'm trying to do is show how all of this works, in a manner of speaking,
"behind the scenes".

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teleclimber
That picture of all the bus riders with their heads down in the newspaper...
The more things change the more they stay the same. And people ignored each-
other in tight spaces long before the smartphone came along.

~~~
k-mcgrady
There's a similar image of commuters on a train reading their papers that I
love [0]. Even with smartphones there are a lot of people that continue to
read the paper on the London Underground (probably because several are
provided for free on the way in, but it's still interesting that people choose
it over their phone).

[0] [http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/commuters-reading-their-
newsp...](http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/commuters-reading-their-newspapers-
on-a-train-in-philad-1472729259)

~~~
mseebach
> but it's still interesting that people choose it over their phone

For one thing, there's no mobile signal in the tube, and the wifi there is,
isn't cheap and only covers stations. I have access to the wifi through my
mobile plan, and I still prefer reading offline content on my tablet or
Kindle.

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leephillips
I remember those woven seat cushions from my youth, especially on the IRT
line, so they were still used probably until some time in the '70s, when all
the seats were replaced with hard plastic in garish colors.

These are good. It's hard photographing in the subway. Kubrick is well known
as a talented photographer - remember how 2001 opens, with a series of still
landscapes. And Barry Lyndon, where every frame is a gorgeous composition,
sometimes forming an homage to a famous painting.

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walkamages
There was a recent exhibition of train and tube photos from London, and it was
amazing to see how smart dress from the mid century gave way to fashions of
the time like mods, teddy boys, punks, skin heads, new wave romantics,
goths,hipsters, and finally back to a more stylish approach. No one looked
happy though. Public transport is a great leveller - we all feel equally
trapped and unhappy upon it!

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jrockway
I love how unchanged the IND is. Canal Street has a new floor, but the wall
still looks identical.

(Is the long escalator High St.? If so, they have swapped the up/down
directions since 1946. Edit: Probably not; looks like there are actually three
escalators there with no staircase in between, while the current configuration
is Down Up Stairs Up.)

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Patrick_Devine
These are really cool. It's amazing that Kubrick is as good at telling a story
through photographs as he is at crafting one in a movie. The two mediums
always struck me as being so unique from each other, that I wouldn't have
thought that you could translate between the two.

