Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining concluded with a famously disturbing photo showing Jack Torrance (as performed by Jack Nicholson) at a 1921 party in the haunted Overlook Hotel. Alasdair Spark, a retired academic who specialized in conspiracy culture, tracked down the original in photo archives now owned by Getty.
"At last, it has been found. Following the earlier identification by facial recognition software of the unknown man in the photograph at the end of 'The Shining' as Santos Casani, a London ballroom dancer, I can reveal that the photo was one of three taken by the Topical Press Agency at a St Valentines Day Ball, 14 February 1921, at the Empress Rooms, the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington.
"I, Aric Toler from the NYT and others (thank you Reddit) had trawled newspaper archives trying to find matching photos of the venue or the people in it, many hours of hard brute force effort, all without success
Just imagine the long strange series of events, decisions and circumstances that ends in Getty, which makes a billion dollars a year licensing photos to newspapers, publishing articles by chopping them up and stuffing them into Instagram comments, where each part ends up algorithmically mixed with the comments of other people.
Previously:
• Watch famous scenes from The Shining, recreated in Lego
• Watch Adam Savage build a model of the maze from The Shining
• The Shining, directed by David Lynch
• Stanley Kubrick explains the endings of 2001 and The Shining in unreleased 1980 documentary footage
• Check out Kubrick's marked-up screenplay copy of The Shining
• The Shining as a Seinfeld-style sitcom
• Explore The Shining in 3D
