The tricks of the trade

JULIUS SHULMAN can still remember the beginning of his career chronicling modern architecture, on the day in March 1936 he went to photograph a Richard Neutra house in the Hollywood Hills. “I had no idea who Neutra was; I’d never met an architect in my life,” Shulman said from his home in Laurel Canyon recently. “But as I walked around the house I saw certain statements I could make with my camera -- which delighted the architect. So I was in business.”

These days, at 95, Shulman is uncomfortable describing which of his photographs are his favorites: “My favorite has to be what I’m doing at that moment. Because when I assemble the elements of the composition, I’m doing something that ends up being very intuitive. I don’t have any preconceived notions.”

Still, he tends to have his photograph entirely conceived before he takes it.

“Benedikt Taschen called me ‘One-Shot Shulman,’ ” he says, “and the name stuck with me ever since.”

Here Shulman discusses a few of the photographs in “Julius Shulman: Modernity and the Metropolis,” on display through Jan. 22 at the Getty Research Institute.

Just don’t call them “shots.” “We’re not hunters,” he scolds. “A shot refers to something instantaneous. We don’t do shooting.” They are, he stresses, properly described as “photographs.”

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Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960

Shulman originally set up his camera inside to photograph the living room of this sleek Pierre Koenig house in the Hollywood Hills. “But while my assistant was setting up, I realized we were doing the wrong thing with the camera.”

Even when he moved the camera outside to show the house suspended over the city, “the two girls in the photograph didn’t change their position. It’s like you’re a silent visitor coming up to the house and observing a conversation, without the two girls knowing you were there. They had no idea what I was doing. One of them later said, ‘When you moved the camera outside, we didn’t know you were going to photograph us at all.’ The average person doesn’t know anything.” It became what Shulman calls “the most widely published photograph of modern architecture in history. “When people ask for that photograph, they call it ‘the photograph of the two girls.’ Little did they know how prominent they’d be in it.”

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Malin Residence, ‘Chemosphere,’ Los Angeles, 1960

This house, which Shulman later photographed for Life magazine, was designed by Los Angeles architect John Lautner.

“By that point I was accustomed to seeing unusual houses. When Lautner explained to me why he didn’t want to excavate a flat pad, but would sink a single column into the mountain and on top of that column put an eight-sided house, it didn’t seem radical. It was very logical. That solid steel and concrete column was very well balanced. There’s not much that can be shaken free by an earthquake.

“Sometimes a structure can be represented through a detail. Here I thought it was important to photograph the entire house.”

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Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, 1947

Here Shulman caught a moment he didn’t expect to, in a house designed by Richard Neutra.

“Around sunset, at twilight, I looked outside and the view looked beautiful and the light was good. I walked outside, saw the mountains in the background -- the light was soft, glowing. The lights inside the house were partially on, partially off. So I quickly rushed inside the house and got my camera, which was on a tripod sitting in the middle of the living room. I slung the tripod over my shoulder with the camera on it, walked outside with my film bag, and that’s it -- put the camera down here and that’s what I took. And you notice I got the entire width of the house.”

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Bass Residence, Case Study House #20, 1958

This is a house in Altadena built in 1958-60 and designed by the architects Buff, Straub and Hensman.

“I chose to use a detail of the building. We have other views showing the whole building, but this one was used on the cover of a magazine because it was more dramatic -- the way I posed the people, near this very strange, bent-over Italian stone pine tree. And it also shows a glimpse inside the house. I composed it with the curve of the pool drawing your eye into the picture.”

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V.C. Morris Gift Shop, San Francisco, 1950

Shulman lighted the inside of the archway of this 1949 building with floodlights, an effect that pleased the building’s architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

“When he saw that archway leading into the building, he said, ‘Mr. Shulman, you’ve portrayed this building the way I designed it. You’ve done what no other photographer has been able to do. Most photographers photographed the outside of the building and did not illuminate the interior, the entrance, which invites you to come in. That’s not a black cave, the way most photographers treat it.’ ”