“No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky” wrote E.B. White in 1949. And lucky are those who head uptown to the Museum of the City of New York for an exhibition of photographs from LOOK, one of America’s most influential pictorial magazines in the post-war era. Some 130 images portray the climbers and self-promoters, the artists and models, the gladiators and showgirls that strutted across its pages. This is a view of life lived large, and sometimes precariously, in a very shiny Big Apple.

As captured by 12 staff photographers, these strivers and arrivers projected, and sometimes perfected, their image before the camera’s eye. The photos, primarily shot in black-and-white, portray the winners, none more charismatic than a young Marlon Brando, whose portrait welcomes visitors to the show. To the right is a photograph of Gardner Cowles, who launched LOOK as a competitor of LIFE, and his wife Fleur, associate editor, who later published the short-lived Flair, which became one of the most respected style magazines of all time. Nearby, a panoramic interior photograph portrays seven architects and developers who transformed Park Avenue, from Grand Central Terminal to 57th Street, into a canyon of glass-and-steel skyscrapers during the 1950s. They are posed together with models of their skyscrapers in a picture that provokes viewers to consider the building boom making headlines in today’s New York papers.

One of the surprises of the exhibition is a large selection of photographs by Stanley Kubrick. He went to work at LOOK at the age of 18, and made his specialty the not-so-distant worlds of boxers and showgirls. His intimate photographs of middleweight champion Rocky Graziano strip the world of a falling hero and his handlers down to the gritty realities of being handled. This 1950 day-in-the-life series includes several sequences displayed as greatly enlarged contact sheets with a distinctly cinematic feel that presage the film career that Kubrick launched not long after these photographs were published.

While his scenes of the Copacabana nightclub present a gilt-edged atmosphere, the photographs Kubrick made of a showgirl named Rosemary Williams reveal the degradation that inevitably comes with the territory. One mysterious night scene, in which a man changing a tire glances surreptitiously up at Williams, who strikes an exaggerated pose under a streetlamp, unwittingly conjures up Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, created between 1977 and 1980.

The handsome exhibition, with its marquee-style identity graphics and informative wall texts adapted from the original articles, was curated by Donald Albrecht and Tom Mellins. Draw from a collection of more than 200,000 images made between 1938 and 1961, it presents a city of dreamers with high-style panache, and a supporting cast of earnest strivers vying for attention as they perform some pretty offbeat jobs.

From the unknown model who gets her 15 minutes of fame while posing high above Fifth Avenue for a billboard advertising Peter Pan bras to the artist Salvador Dali, from socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, photographed while choosing her wedding trousseau, to a tank swimmer in a 52nd Street nightclub, Willing to be Lucky: Ambitious New Yorkers in the Pages of LOOK brings to life a way of looking at life in the pre-ironic age.

Photographs from Museum of the City of New York LOOK Collection
Above: Marlon Brando, photographer unknown, n.d.
Below: Showgirl Rosemary Williams and photographer Stanley Kubrick reflected in her mirror, by Stanley Kubrick, March 28, 1949.