The Original Stock Photo From ‘The Shining’ Has Finally Been Found

It’s one of the most iconic photographs ever to appear in a film: the haunting group portrait that closes The Shining (1980). After decades of mystery, the original image — sans Jack Nicholson — has finally resurfaced in a photo archive after 45 years.

Nicholson, who plays Jack Torrance, was composited into the stock photo by Murray Close who shot him separately in period-accurate costume and lighting to match the 1920s ballroom image which was chosen from a archive. The final version was rescreened and photographed again to look seamless and aged.

But no one kept a record of where, what, and who was in the original photo. Following an investigation by retired British academic Alasdair Spark and New York Times journalist Aric Toler, it has been revealed the original photo was taken by the now defunct Topical Press Agency at a St. Valentine’s Day Ball in the Royal Palace Hotel, London, on February 14, 1921.

The search took “many hours of hard brute force effort” but Spark tracked down the images in the files of the Getty Images Hulton Archive after trawling through thousands of newspaper archive pages and old photos from jazz clubs. The researchers even enlisted the help of Reddit.

Spark found that the original central figure in the image — who was replaced by Nicholson — was famous jazz dance teacher Santos Casani. The team cross-referenced Casani but nothing returned a result.

But after Spark spoke to The Shining’s official set photographer Murray Close, he realized the image must be in the Hulton Library, which had acquired Topical Press Agency. Close insisted that it was in the Hulton Archive because he recalled picking up prints of the photos.

“The absence led to several potentials,” Spark tells Getty Images. “[Perhaps] it was lost, it had been bought out and removed from the BBC Hulton, it was misfiled (there are over 94 million images.)”

Fortunately, Matt Butson, the Vice President of the Hulton Archives, refused to let it lie and kept trawling the archive. Eventually, he found it after discovering that Topical Press images had been “re-indexed” after the agency was acquired by Hulton in 1958.

The researchers later realized that the only recognizable figure in the photo, dance teacher Casani, had been identified under his previous name, John Golman — making the job of finding him a lot harder.

Now that the mystery of the original photo has been resolved, fans can continue to debate the film’s slightly confusing ending. Director Stanley Kubrick has said the photo shows that Torrance is a reincarnation of an earlier official at the hotel. But there are plenty of other theories out there.