The Work of Julius Shulman
Tonight, at the suggestion of photographer Jess Dennis (who, by the way, has an excellent black and white set here), I went to go see Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, a documentary about the life and work of American photographer Julius Shulman.
Don’t recognize the name? I’m not surprised- it’s not a name everyone knows and I’ll confess that I myself had not heard the name. But you have, however,probably seen his work here or there. One of his most widely known works is just below.
Now, this photograph is pretty amazing, but it’s not really typical of Shulman’s work, at least not in my opinion. He had a way of showing the best of the modernism style of architecture in Los Angeles. Just Google Image search his name to see some of his work. The longer I watched the film, the more I realized that I’ve always rather liked the way modernistic buildings looked (think to the scene in The Fast and The Furious when Brian goes to the dwelling the FBI is using as a base with the pool out front), but each time they showed one of these houses in the film, I realized something: Most of them looked terrible.
And it wasn’t just the effects of time.
All of them were houses but none of them felt like homes. Shulman, we learn from the documentary, would bring much of the furniture from his own home to the houses he was shooting to bring life into the shot, to show that people actually lived there (much to the distaste of the architects who wanted to showcase the architectural designs instead). In his preparations, however, Shulman would also try to clean the room up. In one scene caught on video, he asked a man to vacuum over a footprint in the carpet, thus effectively taking out “imperfect” signs of life. The first photograph above actually depicts the girlfriends of two of the architects who worked on that particular building.
A couple of the things that struck me about Julius:
1) He remembers almost every one of his photographs- the architect, the time, how many times he’d shot that particular building, a story or anecdote about the shot itself.
2) In his early years, when someone would offer a suggestion about the lighting or other such thing in his photographs, he wouldn’t just take them into consideration, but would immediately incorporate it into his next shoot. In his later years, once he knew he’d become good at what he did, however, he would try his hardest to ensure everything was being done exactly as he wanted.
3) At age 93, he had such verve, such pluck about him. He died last year at the age of 98.
4) More often than not, Shulman made the architects look better than they were.
5) Where Ansel Adams spent a lot of his time in the darkroom perfecting his images in the processing stage and truly crafted an art out of his work, Julius Shulman was all about composition, preparation, and content. He played with geometry and light, but that was all prior to activating the shutter.
6) Maybe it’s just because it’s a part of modernism, but somehow, Shulman managed to be a landscape and architectural photographer at the same time. He really had a way of being able to bring out the natural elements of his subjects in his photographs, despite the hard, sharp lines the style (in my opinion) became known for.
Shulman seemed like a very captivating, if somewhat hard-headed person, in the documentary, but the more I reflect on the photographs I saw in the film, the more I’ve begun to realize that it was never the buildings themselves that struck me when I saw them in photographs; it was the photographs themselves. Take another look at the first photograph above. The woman on the right is sitting in the corner of a glass house jutting out over a cliff! And the city lights below show you just how high up she is, too. The architecture is fantastic, but this wasn’t a shot (according to Shulman in the documentary) that Shulman even intended to take- he just took a step outside and saw this moment and snapped away at it.
The next stops for the film can be found here. I highly recommend it for anyone curious about architectural photography as Shulman is almost undeniably the greatest architectural photographer the world has seen yet.
