On an 1949 assignment for "Look" magazine, young Stanley Kubrick photographs showgirl Rosemary Williams. Seems like a good gig.

Look magazine was never quite able to steal the spotlight from its equally photo-rich big-city competitor, Life, but the Iowa-based publication waged a good fight with a keen eye for talent and tons of amazing pictures.

After all, they gave a young photographer named Stanley Kubrick more than 300 assignments. And the inaugural issue in 1937 was no shrinking violet: It contained a feature on a Japanese brothel and a pictorial of hermaphrodites. The magazine was founded by Iowa newspaper publishers and brothers John and Gardner Cowles, Jr. The duo were not exactly prepared for the response to the magazine. An excerpt from a 1937 article in Time:

“When brothers John and  Gardner Cowles Jr., publishers of the Des Moines Register and Des Moines Tribune, started Look ten months ago they had no idea whether they would sell 60,000 or 600,000 copies. First issue of the 10¢ monthly gravure picture magazine was a 705,000 sellout, and the present 1,700,000 circulation came in generous leaps and bounds as the monthly became a fortnightly.”

The sad truth is that when Look went out of business in 1971 and Life the following year (for the first time), they both were still very popular periodicals, with millions of subscribers. But advertising had migrated to TV, so the ambitious photojournalism was no longer economically feasible. It’s all cyclical, huh?