(b. Brooklyn, N.Y., 1910, settled in Los Angeles 1920). Photographer of architecture, naturalist, educator, and commentator on urban form. One of the leading architectural photographers of the 20th century, Shulman developed close association with the modernist architects, principally those active in Southern California such as Gregory Ain, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, and R.M. Schindler. Shulman's images played a major role in crafting the image of the Los Angeles and "Southern California lifestyle" to the rest of the nation and world during the 1950s and 1960s. A prolific author, consultant, lecturer, exhibitor, and editor of his own vast archive, Shulman remains active in the first decade of the 21st century.
Julius Shulman was born on 10 October 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, the third of four children of Yetta and Max Shulman, both Russian-born Jewish immigrants. Max Shulman purchased a farm in Connecticut in 1912 and Julius's earliest memories are of a rural, not an urban life. He early developed a keen knowledge of the surrounding flora and fauna; experience living close to the land had a profound impact on his later life and career. In 1920, Shulman's father, persuaded by a relative that great opportunities lay on the Pacific Coast, arranged yet another major move, to Los Angeles. The Shulmans opened the New York Dry Goods store in Boyle Heights on Brooklyn Avenue (Now Cesar Chavez Ave.) As these names imply, Boyle Heights was heavily populated by New York migrants. This was a major Jewish immigrant settlement area in Los Angeles, although not exclusively so. It was a major "melting pot," and Julius remembers his second boyhood community as a diverse meeting ground of Asians, African Americans, and Europeans of all nationalities. At that time Boyle Heights was still on the eastern fringes of the Los Angeles metropolis, bathed in a pervasive scent of orange blossoms. The Shulmans were at the leading edge of a massive wave of migrants to the region during the Boom of the 1920s. Their dry goods store, purveying ready-made clothing and general merchandise, was very successful, enabling the family to live comfortably even after Max Shulman's untimely death in 1923. Although all the children worked in the store, Julius's mother Yetta supported his restless interest in other pursuits. Before he graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1928, Julius had installed an amateur short wave radio receiver and a photographic darkroom in his upstairs bedroom. Encouraged by a high school photography class, Julius roamed 1920s Los Angeles practicing his hobby. He entered the first class of the new Westwood campus of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1929, taking courses in a wide variety of subjects, without a finding a focus. He later transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, but again drifted, and eventually decided to return to Los Angeles, without earning a degree. A remarkable aspect of Julius Shulman's early life is that so many elements of his later success (love of nature, an urban sensibility, technical self-training, photography) are evident only in retrospect. Were it not for a chance encounter, he may have been a happy and successful person, but most probably have remained merely another obscure Angeleno.
Career (1936-1986)
Shulman returned to Los Angeles from Berkeley in 1936, entirely unclear what to do with his life. By chance, a new acquintance, one of Richard Neutra's young architectural assistants, asked Shulman to accompany him to inspect the recently finished Kun Residence (1936). Shulman brought along his Kodak Vest Pocket 120-mm camera, along with a tripod, and shot the house from various angles, merely because he liked to do that sort of thing. He claims that he knew "absolutely nothing" about architecture at that time, and had never heard of Neutra. He processed his photos of the Kun Residence and had his friend show them to Neutra. Neutra was delighted with the way these photos reflected his own design goals, and asked Shulman to photograph more of his buildings. In an instant, Shulman had a career. His hobby was suddenly his profession. Based on his early aesthetic and technical experiments as a hobbyist and an almost instinctive visual sense grounded in his deep love of the natural environment, Shulman almost instantly developed a highly distinctive style of architectural photography, marked by strong geometric compositions, high contrast, sharp focus, and evenly-exposed interior and exterior spaces. This style is also ideally suited to the printed page, so Shulman's images have been in great and constant demand, continuously from the building boom of the post World War II era, through the early 21st century as architectural modernism is staged a revival.
Shulman effectively earned his apprenticeship with Richard Neutra, and the two developed a very close professional relationship which lasted until the latter's death in 1970. Neutra introduced him to the modernist architectural movement, to other leading architects in search of a good photographer, and to magazine editors. Leading architects such as R.M. Schindler coached the neophyte Shulman on the critical requirements of architectural photography (such as lighting), and Shulman seems to have learned very fast indeed. By 1937 his work was already much in demand, and by the time of World War II he had fully established a busy architectural photography business. He also in that year married his first wife, Emma, with whom he had his only child, Judy (b 1945). His success in translating the three-dimensional spaces of architecture to the two-dimensional space of photography earned him fame far beyond Los Angeles and his client list is a "who's who" of every great architect of the twentieth century, including Oscar Niemayer, Mies Van de Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, Shulman was one of the inventors of this profession. Until the 1930s, architects usually took their own photographs, or commissioned unspecialized photographers to do so.
During the 1940s Shulman also became a central figure in the circle of modernists who published in John Entenza's Arts & Architecture. Entenza transformed this once-regional journal into one of the most exciting venues for the modernist movement, especially during the 1950s. In 1943-45 Entenza launched the Case Study House Program (1945-1962), which sought to demonstrate the viability of low-cost residential housing designs on modernist principles: industrial materials (steel, glass, fiberglass), absence of traditional decoration, and open integration with the natural setting. Although the Case Study House program served primarily wealthier clients and failed to achieve is social democratic goals, it did produce many masterpieces of post World War II design. Among them, Ray and Charles Eames, Case Study # 8 (Eames House, 1950) Pierre Koenig's Case Study #21 (1958) and Case Srtudy #22 (Stahl Residence, 1960). Shulman's images were the primary means of representing these Case Study houses to the public, and remain the primary archive for studying the movement today. Indeed, Shulman's own Residence and Studio (1950) in the Hollywood Hills, now a Los Angeles Cultural Landmark, was designed by Raphael Soriano.
By the 1950s and 1960s Shulman's images nearly dominated the pages of the magazine trade, playing a pivotal role in the promotion of modernism as an architectural style through mass-market magazines such as Life, Look, Time, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and House and Garden. Shulman by the 1950s had full-time field and lab assistants, producing images from at least one assignment per day. He not only enjoyed the reputation as Soutern California's image-maker, but also became a major avatar of modernist architecture in the Midwest. His images of Iowa architect Ray Crites and the Kansas architectural firm Ramey and Himes secured their reputations in the New York-based national magazines. "So, Mr. Shulman, what have you brought from the corn fields of Iowa today?" one New York editor remarked. At the zenith of his career Shulman wrote a book on methods, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (N.Y: Whitney Library of Design, 1962). Characteristically, he was eager to share the skills he had developed. In 1969 he was awarded the Gold Medal for architectural photography by the American Institute of Architecture (AIA), and in 1980 he was inducted to the AIA as an honorary member.
While Shulman's work is appropriately associated with the modernist movement, his business was also based on a steady stream of "bread and butter" work. Furniture makers and manufacturers of practically any building material such as door locks and urinals commissioned him to photograph their wares. He also had a steady stream of corporate clients such as Northrup, Prudential, Firestone, and Transamerica, for which he photographed the office and industrial structures built in the International Style of modernism. Shulman also took a leading role in the image creation for the Palm Springs area, where the wealthy and celebrated built retreats designed by leading architects. Shulman had begun camping with Native Americans in the Palm Springs area in the 1920s, before any developments had arrived, so again his early life merged with his professional life, to produce visually stunning images that contextualized each structure in its desert setting.
Later Work (1986-2002)
Scores of Shulman's images have become icons of both modernist architecture and of the "Southern California lifestyle." Examples include Richard Neutra's Kaufman House in Palm Springs at dusk (1947), and the nighttime image of Pierre Koenig's Stahl House (1960), now reportedly the single most published architectural photograph in the world. Shulman specialized in modernist architecture, so his huge archive is a virtually complete collection of that movement in North America. The close working relationships Shulman developed with scores of major architects and interior designers make his archive a central reference point for such figures as Schindler, Charles and Ray Eames, and Raphael Soriano.
Shulman stopped taking new assignments in 1986, fifty years after his first assignment. He then devoted himself full-time to managing the daily stream of requests for publication and exhibitions of his work, writing, speaking, and holding seminars for students from schools of architecture, planning, and design in the Los Angeles region. His companion during these years was his second wife, Olga, whom he married three years after the death of Emma in 1973.
By the early 21st century, major books devoted to Shulman's work appeared almost every year. He found a very effective publisher in Benedikt Taschen, whose worldwide distribution has further spread Shulman's influence and has fed a revival of interest in the modernist movement, its architects, and the Case Study Program. Shulman's autobiographical Architecture and its Photography (Cologne: Taschen, 1998) was followed by Richard Neutra: Complete Works (Taschen 2000); Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen 2000); Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program (Taschen 2002). Several more books, like these filled exclusively with hundreds of Shulman images, are in preparation.
Author: Philip J. Ethington, University of Southern California (Entry last revised 21 June 2002)
