Faithful rendering

It’s a beautiful, clear Thursday morning, and Julius Shulman is on the job. The dean of modern architecture photography, who celebrated his 92nd birthday on Oct. 10, has an assignment: shooting the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.Dressed in a brick-red shirt, brown trousers and suspenders emblazoned with American flags, with lavender socks peeking out above comfy beige shoes, Shulman may look like a casual artiste, but he didn’t earn his reputation by fooling around. Starting in the late 1930s, his photographs of homes by Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler, along with the famed Arts & Architecture-sponsored Case Study houses, became the signature images of L.A. modernism. What we have at the cathedral today is a human legend shooting an architectural icon.

And he leaves nothing to chance. If he has a motto, it must be “think before you click.” Most people “don’t notice that if you move to the right or the left, you might get a better view,” he says. “They just go click, click, click.”

During the last few weeks, Shulman has made distinctive pictures of the Jose Rafael Moneo-designed cathedral, but he has a few more locations in mind. With his longtime assistant, David Glomb, carrying his equipment, he glides across the upper plaza, pushing a walker that he doesn’t seem to need. He enters the north door of the cathedral and heads toward the confessionals, three side-by-side chambers sheathed in polished wood.

Most people’s knowledge of confessionals is limited to images in films, he says. “We get a glimpse of a sinner in a cage. I want to show what a confessional looks like, with one room open, one closed and a person coming in. I want to show how it occupies space in a cathedral.”

Shulman is working with a Mamiya camera that produces 2 1/4- by 3-inch transparencies. On earlier cathedral shoots he made 4- by 5-inch transparencies with a Sinar. But “the camera is the photographer’s least important tool,” he says. “It’s what goes on in the mind that counts.”

Glomb sets up a trial shot, then pulls off a Polaroid print. The light isn’t right and the composition should be tighter, Shulman says. Glomb moves the tripod-mounted camera closer while Shulman walks through the middle confessional, opens the back door -- out of the camera’s view -- and props it ajar with a chair. He goes back to the camera, looks through the viewfinder, then moves the chair to adjust the light.

A cathedral staffer is guarding one entrance to the confessional area so that roaming visitors don’t spoil Shulman’s picture. To provide the necessary human presence, exactly as he wants it, he has asked Rose Nielsen, a photographer who has digitized some of his cathedral pictures, to pose as if she were a parishioner entering the confessional.

“That’s good,” Shulman says, looking at a Polaroid image of the composition. “It’s a better composition than I thought it would be.”

He gets one or two shots, and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony stops by. They walk to the back of the cathedral, pull up a couple of chairs near the baptistry and peruse a batch of transparencies and digital prints.

“He’s the Ansel Adams of architecture photography,” Mahony says as he holds the transparencies up to the light. “I would not want him to see the pictures I’ve taken of the cathedral.”

Then Mahony retreats and Shulman goes back to work.

“This is where you get the best perspective of the pews,” he says, setting up his camera near the rear of the north wall of the nave. “Look how the light hits the top of the pews,” he says, pointing out a rippling effect. “And the light from the alabaster window is OK too.”

In his opinion, the alabaster works particularly well on the north side of the cathedral, but the window at the front of the church? Maybe not. “If I were Cardinal Shulman, I would say no to alabaster on the east wall because it puts too much light in the eyes of the congregation. There’s a reason that many cathedrals have rose windows.”

Apart from that flaw and, even worse, “the barber shop light fixtures” in the nave, Shulman loves the interior of the cathedral. “The exterior is too abrasive. It doesn’t have the visual acoustics I look for.” But inside, “there’s never a dull moment.”

And he has had several field days, meticulously composing and shooting aspects of the interior architecture that others might not notice. Every so often, he pauses and says, “There’s something magical here,” as he sees yet another picture that he wants.

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE --- The three photos credited to Julius Shulman have been deleted from the photo database per instructions from a photo editor. The Times does not have the rights to re-use or archive them. --- END NOTE ---