Vintage Athletes - Part 15

LOOK Magazine

Many of my vintage photos of athletes and the military come from the LIFE magazine archive, a treasure trove of 4 million images (most never published) that is available online.

LOOK magazine, like its competitor LIFE, featured lots of photographs, but most of the LOOK photo archive is not online.  However, the LOOK photos from the New York City area are now held by the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), which has digitized them and put them online.

I don't know whether any of these photos were actually published in LOOK magazine.

Stanley Kubrick is famous as a film maker (A Clockwork Orange, 2001), but early in his career he was a photographer for LOOK magazine.  The first three photos are from a 1948 photo set by Kubrick called "Walter Carter, Prizefighter of Greenwich Village."  Carter was a professional boxer at the time.  In 1951, Kubrick used Carter and his twin brother as actors in his first film, Day of the Fight.  Carter later became a TV actor, playing a soldier in Sergeant Bilko's squad on The Phil Silvers Show.

Carter is clearly aware that he's being photographed in the shower, since he's smiling for the camera, above.

Carter is joined in the shower by another guy.  It was perfectly normal in those days for athletes to shower next to each other in a group shower room, but these guys seem to be sharing the same shower head, which the other guy is adjusting to point at him.

And now Carter steps under the shower head while the other guy stands aside (but not very far aside).

Stanley Kubrick also did a photo set for LOOK in 1949-1950 called "Rocky Graziano, He's a Good Boy Now."  Graziano was a famous boxer who had held the world middleweight boxing title.  This Kubrick photo of Graziano in the shower has been widely reproduced.

Here, Graziano is getting his arm massaged.

This is Graziano before a fight.  He looks like he's been oiled.

This photo of Graziano shows him, still naked, doing an eye test with a doctor.

Our last LOOK photo set covers Brooklyn Dodgers player Roy Campanella, photographed by Kenneth Eide in 1953.  Campanella is soaking his legs in a whirlpool bath

Here, Campanella is sitting on a massage table.

And then he lies down, perhaps about to get a massage.  Athletes were not shy about locker room nudity, even with photographers present.  The photographer probably suggested the strategically placed towel, because magazines like LIFE and LOOK would publish rear nudity but not frontal nudity.