Art: Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick
Inverleith House, Edinburgh
***

Stanley Kubrick once said that to make a film entirely by yourself, as he did in his early career, "you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography". It sounds like a truism, masterful and meaningless. But Kubrick knew what he was talking about.

Before the films, before the powerful moving images in 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick produced more than 800 photographs - still images through which he made a living in his late teens. Floundering at school, he took up photography after his father gave him a camera for his 13th birthday.

At 15, he took an image that seemed to define a moment of national loss - a newspaper vendor at his stall, crumpled and sad, as front pages around him related the death of President FD Roosevelt. Kubrick sold it to Look for $25; the magazine then hired him and he toured the US in his late teens, capturing postwar society for Look's photo-stories.

This exhibition, Still Moving Pictures 1945-1950, presents more than 100 of these images for the first time in Britain. The main interest is biographical: what the young Kubrick did as a job while he dreamed of making films. But there is a rigorous compositional eye in the best of these photographs, and the framing of subjects in a handful of them shows a talent beyond the photo-journalism he was engaged in.

An elegant portrait of debutante Betsy von Furstenberg, reading in a window seat, legs raised and toes pointing away; several stills from the series What Every Teenager Should Know About Dating; the best of the small-scale studies of boxing - in these we see an eye for what to shoot and how.

That said, the exhibition's only raison d' tre is that Kubrick took these shots. The changing social and built landscape of late-1940s and 1950s America is familiar to us because it was so heavily photographed, often for newly popular magazines such as Look. There is nothing to mark these images as the work of the same talent that would later bring us Dr Strangelove or Full Metal Jacket.

I'm not sure, either, that removing the photographs from their commercial context works. Sure, the photo-stories were "pretty dumb", as Kubrick once commented, and they constrained his imagination far more than they stirred it, but to reify these images as fine art strips the life from them, particularly because their creator went on to do other, great work.

It's a revealing exhibition for Kubrick fans, not least because it shows him producing unchallenging work for the mainstream market. That, more than any one image, is the shock here.

• Until April 1. Details: 0131-248 2943.

Contributor

Elisabeth Mahoney

The GuardianTramp

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