Saturday, August 24, 2013
Stanley Kubrick's Photos of Post-War NYC Subways Are Eerily Intimate
Photos courtesy MCNY.
Long before he was leading us into the distance with the forbidden fruit of filmmaking, Stanley Kubrick was cutting his teeth as a photographer for LOOK Magazine. The gig often had him scouring the shadows of the urban milieu with sly, shot-from-the-hip tendencies—more Walker Evans documentarian than Daily News photojournalist.
Take Life and Love on the New York Subway, a collection of Kubrick's photos of New York City's subway system from 1946. The images seem to gravitate toward the individual, or at the very least small clusters of commuters, leaving the whole thing teetering on the edge of the known. We're given just enough information to be pulled into Kubrick's subjects' sad little orbits, but that's still nevertheless not enough to see them as anything but faces in the crowd, like this guy here. It's almost like he's about to tell you to give him the fucking bat:
It was an exercise in austerity. “I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light," Kubrick was quoted by Mildred Stagg, who added:
People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn’t shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.
So what you get are brief, isolated flashes of raw human condition suspended between trains coming and going, like this hushed exchange:
Or this grim gem:
Inside the CIA's Role in Pakistan's Polio Outbreak
Oral polio vaccine being delivered in India, via Wikimedia Commons.
Whether the connection is meaningful or not, the anti-vaccine people share their stance with Taliban warlords.
Pakistan is the only country in Asia with confirmed Wild Polio Virus type 3, and along with neighbors Afghanistan and Nigeria is one of three countries where polio is still endemic. The country has been working to eradicate polio since 1988, and making progress. Then, in 2012, the efforts hit a major roadblock.
A local warlord banned vaccinations after Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi was linked to the CIA operation to find Osama bin Laden. Under the guise of giving out a Hepatitis B vaccination, the doctor collected DNA samples from children, looking for bin Laden’s family members.
A link was established between the CIA and vaccinations and starting on June 16, 2012, tribal leaders banned the vaccination campaign. The Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur said vaccinations would be banned until the CIA stopped its drone campaign in North Waziristan,according to UPI.
And the ban has been enforced. In the 14 months since it was lowered, at least 22 people involved in vaccination efforts have been killed and another 14 have been injured. As a result, an estimated 300,000 children in North and South Waziristan were forbidden from vaccinations, and the UN was forced to suspend polio eradication efforts in Pakistan. There have been 24 cases of polio in Pakistan so far this year, and three cases of paralysis, but as the New York Times pointed out, "even one case shows that the virus is in the area and could spread." Or
The medical community is understandably pissed at the CIA for compromising them and making their difficult work even harder. “Medical neutrality is outlined in the Hippocratic Oath and is delineated in the Geneva Conventions,” said a Johns Hopkins press release that accompanied a letter to Obama from 12 prominent public health officials this past January.
An opinion piece in Scientific American from May 2 outlined, in more detail and stronger language, why the CIA shouldn’t have used a sham-vaccination ruse. “Few mourn [bin Laden] the man responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of innocent people worldwide over the years,” the article said. “But the operation that led to his death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more.”
The letter goes on to explain that it is “hard enough” to distribute vaccines in politically unstable regions, and ones where the uneducated harbor an aversion to vaccines based on rumors. One, perpetrated and spread by extremist Islamic leaders, is that the vaccine is a CIA plot to sterilize Muslim children, according to the New Statesman. Another is that it contains materials forbidden by Islam, such as alcohol and pig’s blood.
The health workers's ire is rooted in feeling like they are missing an opportunity. They felt they had polio on the run. And unlike a war on "terror," health care officials have a plan and timeline to win their war.
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