Stanley Kubrick

📍Grand Concourse, The Bronx, New York, NY 10457, USA

“I was born in Manhattan in July 1928 and grew up in the Bronx, first in an apartment on Clinton Avenue and later in buildings off the Grand Concourse, the borough's grand boulevard of Art Deco apartment houses. My father, Jack, was a doctor, and my mother, Gertrude, a homemaker; I had a younger sister, Barbara. Ours was a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family, and my father, though not religious, gave me two great gifts: chess, which he taught me at twelve, and a camera. I was a poor student who found school boring, and at William Howard Taft High School my grades were miserable. But I read everything, played drums in the school swing band, and became obsessed with photography after my father bought me a Graflex camera when I was thirteen. I wandered the Bronx and Manhattan taking pictures, and I played chess for money in Washington Square Park and at the Marshall Chess Club. I also spent endless hours at the Loew's Paradise and the other cinemas along the Concourse, watching everything. While I was still at school, I sold a photograph to Look magazine of a newspaper vendor mourning President Roosevelt's death, and after graduating in 1945 I joined Look as a staff photographer. With what I learned about light and composition, I taught myself to make films, and went on to direct Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Chess taught me patience, and the Bronx taught me to look closely at everything.”

Sources: vocal.media Wikipedia: Stanley Kubrick