AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Photographs of modern houses in Southern California, above all Case Study House #22 at night (1960)
- Worked in
- Black and white, mostly
- Camera
- A Kodak Vest Pocket at the start; later a professional view camera
- Also
- AIA Architectural Photography Medal (1969); his archive is at the Getty Research Institute
- Start with
- Julius Shulman: Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen, 2000)
Julius Shulman (1910–2009) was an American photographer whose pictures of modern houses shaped how the world sees mid-century California. He worked for about seventy years, for architects such as Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner and Pierre Koenig. His 1960 night view of Case Study House #22 is one of the best-known architectural photographs ever made.
The story
In 1936 an acquaintance who worked for the architect Richard Neutra asked Julius Shulman to photograph a new house in the Hollywood Hills. The Kun House was almost finished. Shulman was in his mid-twenties. He had never met an architect, and he had no plan to become a photographer. With a small amateur camera, a Kodak Vest Pocket, he made six pictures. The acquaintance showed them to Neutra. Neutra liked them, and soon he was asking Shulman to photograph his other houses.
Shulman was born in Brooklyn in 1910 and grew up on a small farm in Connecticut. In 1920 his family moved to Los Angeles. As a Boy Scout he hiked in the mountains, and he later said this taught him about light. He took only one photography class, in high school, and got an A. At UCLA and Berkeley he sold snapshots to other students.
But those six pictures became a career of about seventy years. Through Neutra he met other architects: Schindler, Raphael Soriano, John Lautner, Pierre Koenig. He worked mostly in black and white and mostly on houses. He was also one of the first to put people in his architecture pictures. Of the 26 Case Study Houses built in Southern California, he photographed 18.
One evening in 1960 he was at Koenig’s Case Study House #22, high above Los Angeles. He had planned to photograph the interior. Two young women, girlfriends of architects who worked with Koenig, sat talking in the living room. Shulman stepped outside to look at the view, then turned back to the house. Through the glass he saw the two women. “Carlos, bring the camera out quickly. We’re changing the composition,” he called to his assistant. The women never realized they would be in the picture. They thought he was photographing the outside of the house.
It became, in his words, the most widely published architectural photograph ever. Like the six snapshots of the Kun House, it was not planned. It came from stopping and looking. “It was not an architectural quote-unquote ‘photograph,’” he said. “It was a picture of a mood.”
The work
- 1910Born on October 10 in Brooklyn, New York
- 1920Moves with his family to Los Angeles
- 1934Photographs City Hall reflected in the Union Station construction site
- 1936Photographs Neutra’s Kun House; Neutra gives him work
- 1950Opens his own studio in Los Angeles
- 1960Photographs Case Study House #22 at night
- 1969Receives the AIA Architectural Photography Medal
- 2004The Getty Research Institute acquires his archive
- 2009Dies on July 15 at home in Los Angeles, aged 98
Lessons
Look before you shoot. He told students to put their cameras away and first study the building in their minds.
Bring people in. He used people in his pictures so that the houses would come alive.
Be ready to change the plan. His most famous photograph came when he walked outside and saw a better view than the one he had planned.
Try this: choose one building or room. Spend fifteen minutes looking at it without a camera, from inside and from outside. Then ask a friend to sit in it and do something normal, like reading or talking, and make one photograph from the spot you liked best.
Gear
Shulman said the camera mattered less than the mind behind it, but his tools changed over the years.
Folding pocket camera: in the 1930s he used an Eastman Kodak Vest Pocket camera to photograph Los Angeles, and it made his first pictures for Neutra in 1936.
View camera: he later moved to a professional view camera for his architectural work.
He lit interiors with flash, not floodlights, and he never needed a light meter. For one dusk photograph of a house in Palm Springs he exposed the house, the pool and the landscape separately, about 45 minutes in all.
Books
Julius Shulman: Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen, 2000). A thick book of 575 pages with text by Pierluigi Serraino, in English, French and German. It goes deep into Shulman’s archive and shows hundreds of photographs that had never been published. It opens with an essay on photography and the rise of American modernism, followed by the projects. The best place to start if you want to see how much more there is than the famous houses.
A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman (Rizzoli, 1994). A 224-page study by the curator Joseph Rosa, with an essay by the architecture writer Esther McCoy. Rosa explains how Shulman worked: his method, how he “dressed” a photograph, and how his pictures helped sell modern architecture. The plates run decade by decade from the 1930s to the 1980s, and the book ends with “My Odyssey,” a text by Shulman himself. Good for readers who want to understand his thinking, not only see the pictures.
Photographing Architecture and Interiors (Balcony Press, 2000; first published 1962). Shulman’s own first book, with an introduction by Richard Neutra, reissued in facsimile with a new foreword by Shulman. In 180 pages he explains composition, camera angles, lenses and lighting for exteriors and interiors, black-and-white and color film, and darkroom work. Hundreds of his photographs carry captions on how each one was made, and the book ends with a full shoot of a house in Bel Air. The most useful one for photographers.
Julius Shulman: Palm Springs (Rizzoli, 2008). A 208-page book with a foreword by Shulman and text by Michael Stern, who curated the related exhibition, and the architecture writer Alan Hess. It covers more than sixty buildings in the desert town by fifteen architects, among them Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, Paul R. Williams and John Lautner. Many photographs come from Shulman’s own collection and the Getty and had never been published. For lovers of mid-century desert modernism.
In his words
“I was lucky to be doing the right thing at the right place at the right time.”
