Kubrick departed from the magazine that same year, having completed his first film, the documentary Day of the Fight, whose subject, Walter Cartier, he first shot for Look. But in many ways, Kubrick had already defined the magazine’s gritty ethos, its commitment to narrative arc and, most of all, its preoccupation with the subjects in the fringe of the shot. His stills for a feature on Frank Sinatra linger not on the singer so much as on his onlooking fans. On assignment to shoot a midtown billboard painter, Kubrick looks past the ad for the “Merry-Go-Round” bra to the upturned faces of the people below.
Look showcased people who came to the city with what E.B. White called the essential New York willingness “to be lucky.” Among them was Elsa Maxwell, a self-proclaimed “short, fat homely piano player from Keokuk, Iowa, with no money or background,” who propelled herself to socialite status, wrote a syndicated gossip column and became legendary for her parties, among them “Treasure Hunt” parties (she invented the scavenger hunt), “Come-as-Your-Opposite” parties, “Come-as-You-Were-When-the-Autobus-Called” parties and, as Brooke Astor told Time, “a party where pink pigs walked down the aisle.”
The magazine also chronicled the beady new phenomenon of television, devoting spreads to its back rooms, its casting calls, its influential producers. It was slowly becoming clear, even to Look photographers, that TV was the American living room’s glossy new arbiter of images, that pictures had sped up, flipbook-style, along with people’s appetites for them. Look‘s advertising defaulted to this unyielding new media, and in 1970 the magazine published its last issue, followed a year later by Life.
BY THEN, NEW YORK had changed, too, moving away from Look‘s metropolis of self-propulsion and reinvention, becoming instead synonymous with mass urban decay and disillusionment. The Look Building held on to its enormous letters a whole decade past the magazine’s disappearance, though the structure itself was no longer eye-catching and new. In a city consumed by modernist sheen, it was no longer extraordinary. It was, however, finally anointed with landmark status in November 2009, among the Bloomberg administration’s trend toward Modern awardees.
Perhaps the Look Building’s most prominent recent tenant, Institutional Investor, is also in the publishing industry, though it seems somewhat artless to equate two such divergent publications—one aimed at executives in corporate finance, the other a magazine staffed largely by WPA photographers whose subjects included garment workers and longshoremen, the sort of working-class New Yorkers pushed farther and farther into the outer boroughs’ reaches, if not displaced entirely.
These days, in another moment of media unrest, as the industry talks in terms of hyper-specialization and niche markets, it’s difficult to imagine a publication having such faith in its readership, abiding by the odd belief in multiplicity—not only in the subjects it featured but in the compulsions of its audience. That its readers might not know they had an interest in churchgoers in Harlem or a waitress at the Copacabana, but that, once such subjects were launched out into the world, the great throbbing multitudes would recognize something familiar in them.
egeminder@observer.com
