At 90, Still Building on His Art

One of the prime architects of the California dream is a 90-year-old guy who’s lining up a schedule that would tax a baby boomer: Julius Shulman has mapped out plans for his next two books, and he’s contemplating his winter vacation--a cross-country skiing trip to Mammoth. But don’t think Shulman is blind to his limitations. He gave up downhill skiing last year because he was beginning to get a little wobbly. You understand.

“I’m only middle age,” Shulman says. “I’m a fervent observer of the life of Methuselah.”

Indeed, Shulman has surprisingly smooth cheeks and a snappy memory. Considered the most important architectural photographer of the West Coast, he gives the impression of being nearly as nimble as he was when he first fixed his lens on the masterpieces of California Modernism. When it comes to the making of the California myth, Shulman has been the man behind the curtain--or more to the point, behind the focusing cloth. Shulman’s California was a postwar dream of clean living, and while he may not be a household name, his images of the promise of suburban bliss have had an enormous impact on America’s idea of its own frontier.

Many of Shulman’s photographs of the work of such iconic architects as Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler, Pierre Koenig and John Lautner have been published hundreds of times in magazines and books and are burned into the collective consciousness. Probably the most famous is Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22, one of a series of homes commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine in the 1950s as models for efficient postwar living.

Shulman’s 1960 black-and-white photo of the Koenig house, showing two women idling in a glass-box living room overlooking a carpet of lights, is one of the most published photographs of residential architecture.

“Julius just has lived so long,” says Robert Timme, dean of USC’s School of Architecture. “If you live 200 years and do the same thing well, someone will discover you’re really good. And his career spans Modernism. Now we’re looking back at that time, and Julius was there.”

And now Shulman, too, is having a deja vu. He recently went back through his extensive archives to exhume striking examples of Modernism that are not well-known, such as work by William Pereira, Gordon Drake, William Sutherland Beckett and Iowa’s Ray Crites. The result is “Modernism Rediscovered,” a collaboration by the photographer with UC Berkeley architectural historian Pierluigi Serraino, which has just come off the presses of Cologne, Germany-based art book publisher Benedikt Taschen.

Evidence of a Notable Career

“The timing is perfect in my life,” Shulman says. He’s sitting behind the desk of the flat-roofed studio that his good friend, architect Raphael Soriano, designed for him in the Hollywood Hills in 1950. Around him, the evidence of a remarkable career is neatly filed in drawers and on shelves, stacked against walls and noted in palm-size planners dating to the Depression. The first camera he used professionally, his Eastman Kodak Vest Pocket camera with a bellows that unfolds like a Murphy bed, is at easy reach in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk. He likes to aim it at his audiences when he starts a lecture.

“I couldn’t have planned it any better,” Shulman continues. “I went to university for seven years, never majored in anything. I never graduated. Two weeks after I came back from Berkeley in 1936, middle of February, I met Neutra by the fact that I took snapshots of the Neutra Kun House. And the young man I was with, who I met through my older sister, had shown me the house. I’d never seen a modern house before.

“I made 8-by-10 prints, sent them to this fellow, and the next thing I know he calls and says, ‘Oh, I showed the pictures to Mr. Neutra. He wants to meet you this coming Saturday.’ It was March 5, 1936.

“Apparently I was already ordained by whatever forces--mysticism, karma. You can put any label on it. I go back to when I was 5 years old, living on a farm in Central Village, Conn. I used to wander around the farm and the woods. My two brothers and two sisters didn’t do that. I was the only one of five children who was ordained, if you will, to become something more than just a salesman or doctor, to become a photographer of architecture. And I’m still there. Look at what’s happening in my life. Taschen considers me a member of his family. I like that because he has a 22-year-old daughter.” His voice drops to a whisper. “And she’s beautiful.” Shulman, twice widowed, chuckles impishly.

The photographer’s collaboration with Neutra over the next several decades became the stuff of legend, and it’s celebrated in another new book by Taschen, mostly illustrated with Shulman’s photographs: “Richard Neutra: The Complete Works,” with text by Barbara Lamprecht.

Shulman, who shot most of Neutra’s work, learned a lot from the architect about using light and shadow in photography. Neutra never wanted Shulman to shoot his buildings unless he was there. It didn’t always turn out that way. Neutra preferred bare-bones shots with only a throw rug or a stick of furniture so that the photo would focus on his design. But Shulman had his own ideas about how buildings were meant to be livable, which didn’t always match the architect’s vision. The two strong-willed artists butted aesthetics when Shulman photographed Neutra’s Maslon residence in Cathedral City, near Palm Springs, in 1962.

“Neutra had his staff with him, a couple of fellows, because I had made it clear to Neutra many years before that my assistant and I are here to do photographs, we’re not going to move furniture. He had his fellows take out three or four pieces. When we got through photographing toward the end of the day, I said to Mrs. Maslon, ‘I don’t have to apologize for Neutra. But I’m going to anyhow for what he’s doing to your house. May I come back in a few weeks and really photograph it the way you live in it?’

“They lived in it spectacularly well, because the Maslons had an important contemporary art collection.” Shortly after Shulman finished the second shoot, he received a request from Connaissance des Arts, a prominent French art publication, for photographs illustrating how contemporary art was key to home design. Voila.

Shulman retired from photography for the most part in the late ‘80s and is focusing on making books and giving lectures. Ironically, during this same period he has become recognized as an artist himself, not just a chronicler of other people’s work.

While Shulman’s photographs had long been included in exhibitions on architecture, in the past decade his work has been shown on gallery walls as fine art. That’s partly because Santa Monica art dealer Craig Krull began representing him in 1990; as a result, Shulman now shows with nine galleries around the world. Krull is mounting the first all-color show of Shulman’s work at his Bergamot Station gallery, opening Dec. 2, including a rarely published image of Case Study House No. 22.

Shulman has also lived long enough to enjoy the fruits of a late-blooming appreciation for the art of architectural photography. “It goes back to Alfred Stieglitz,” says Robert Sobieszek, photography curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, explaining the delay. “He said that if you work commercially, you cannot be an artist.”

A Style All His Own

Sobieszek does not buy into Stieglitz’s prejudices, and he does not see Shulman as purely a documentarian of others’ work. “He made a style of architecture and a style of living look absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and desirable. Truth has nothing to do with it.”

Then there’s the trickle-down impact of Shulman’s images on filmmakers re-creating California for the world. Take an interlude from the current cultural conversation. Lautner’s Chemosphere and Case Study House No. 22 show up in “Charlie’s Angels” and “Nurse Betty,” just to cherry pick from the recent crop of films. They’re used as settings meant to suggest high style in the new millennium, even several decades after they were built.

“I would scarcely put myself on the same page as Julius Shulman in terms of artistic achievement,” says “Charlie’s Angels” director McG, who commissioned a re-creation of the Chemosphere for the film. “But I think we’re both enthusiastic proponents of the California lifestyle.”

Other new-generation style makers have called Shulman to sit at his feet as well. Gucci’s Tom Ford enticed the photographer out of retirement a couple of years ago to shoot Neutra’s Brown House, a Bel-Air landmark that Ford bought and restored after seeing Shulman’s earlier photographs. More recently, Shulman has been chatting with Brad Pitt about their shared passion for architecture and photography.

“They sent a driver up here to pick me up,” Shulman says. “We met with him and his wife. She makes good coffee.”

To put it simply, Julius Shulman is cool these days.

The new monograph has been eagerly anticipated as a new window onto Modernist architecture. Because, unlike other art forms, which are lighter on their feet, architecture faces the tree-in-the-forest problem: If buildings aren’t reproduced by another medium, i.e. photography, do they make a sound when it comes to public awareness?

“Personally, nothing replaces the experience of the space,” Serraino says. “But how many people know the actual address of Case Study House No. 22? A house is very difficult to be accessed, so photographs become really key for that particular project to be remembered. You can have the best buildings in the world, but if they aren’t photographed and published, they simply don’t exist.”

Shulman helped bring the mountain of California Modernism to the East Coast and European establishment by cultivating a network of connections with design editors in magazines and newspapers. In the view of many, that made him a power broker in the world of architecture.

But Shulman’s high profile--and his enthusiasm for self-promotion--has also been a bone of contention among some in the architectural community, Koenig among them. He credits Shulman with having an unerring eye and with being an effective communicator. But he complains that the photographer takes the lion’s share of credit for the success of Case Study House No. 22.

“He thinks that nothing is going to exist without him,” Koenig says. “That’s not quite true. The architects give him the wonderful settings he can shoot. It takes a team, and he’s part of that team. He thinks [that] without him, none of this would exist, and of course it would.”

USC’s Timme sighs when reminded of the respectful rivalry between the two giants. “Did Julius make Pierre? Did Pierre make Julius? Where the chronicler becomes the artist, it’s a tough one. Look at Ry Cooder and Buena Vista Social Club. Everyone talks about how great Ry Cooder was because he discovered all those trees that had fallen in the forest [forgotten Cuban musicians such as Ibrahim Ferrer]. If you dwell on it, you’re missing the bigger picture, which is that this whole process allows the work to be disseminated and everyone should share in the glory of it.”

Sobieszek applauds the eye of the beholder.

“A good architectural photograph couldn’t happen without the photographer,” he says. “It’s his eye, his interpretation. Julius is a very dramatic photographer, and he knows how to get to the core of the building. He has a design sense that’s impeccable. He has a sense of visual bravura of composition, so that he can take a rather mundane house and make it look exciting, and take a spectacular house and make it look triply spectacular.” Or, as a writer in ARTnews once put it: “If buildings were people, those in Julius Shulman’s photographs would be Grace Kelly: classically elegant, intriguingly remote.”