John O’Brian was working on two other exhibitions when he stumbled on them. Sitting in the archive at the International Centre of Photography in New York—unknown even to the chief curator—was a true lost treasure: 100 photographs taken by Weegee on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

“And they were fascinating,” O’Brian tells the Straight, adding that “maybe five” of the remarkably stark photos have ever been shown publicly since the film’s release in 1964. Now a series of them are on display at Presentation House Gallery (333 Chesterfield Avenue, North Vancouver).

On Saturday (June 22), O’Brian presents a talk on the strange collision of these two things: the legendary tabloid photographer and the pitch black end-of-the-world satire Kubrick made in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The two men had actually become acquainted almost two decades earlier. When the teenage Kubrick was working as a photojournalist for Look magazine in the late ‘40s, Weegee (real name Arthur Feelig) was infamous for the graphic crime scene images he was capturing for the New York press.

“He did point blank, flash photography of those scenes and became much admired for it, and one of his admirers was Kubrick,” O’Brian explains, adding that he sees Weegee’s aesthetic visibly bleeding into the film. “He wanted that tabloid, in your face look for Dr. Strangelove, or so I argue,” he says. But an interview between the photographer and star Peter Sellers, recorded by the BBC at Shepperton studios—it provides ambient sound for the exhibition—further illuminates. “I do it to make Stanley happy,” Weegee tells the actor, after pointing out that he’s using a flash in an environment already bathed in light.

“Faster film and better lenses means that nobody’s using flash at that point. It’s anachronistic, and so I wondered why Kubrick specified flash. Well, on a metaphorical level, every time Weegee took a photograph it was like a little mini atomic explosion,” says O’Brian, who calls Weegee’s presence on set “talismanic,” noting that there were already two official studio photographers covering the production. “It’s the sort of thing that Kubrick cared about,” he says.

A professor of art history at UBC, writer and curator, O’Brian has also produced an essay called “One Eye Wide Shut” that further explores both the history and possible meaning of their collaboration.

Beyond all that is the immediacy of the images themselves. One entire wall shows us Kubrick at work, atop a ladder as he points his camera at the prone figure of Tracy Reed, peering through his hands, or drawing Lolita's sunglasses on an atom bomb. Another wall is dedicated to the fabled pie fight scene that Kubrick spent five days filming but never used; pictures which O’Brian describes as “remarkable in their abstractness.”

Perhaps just as remarkable is the opportunity provided by the exhibition to re-explore something that has become so familiar. O’Brian could have called it Strangelove’s Weegee, or: How I Learned to See the Bomb with New Eyes.

Strangelove's Weegee continues until July 26 at the Presentation House Gallery. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb screens on July 10 at the Empire Theatres Esplanade (200 West Esplanade, North Vancouver)