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Julius Shulman, one of the great architectural photographers and a living icon in Los Angeles, celebrated his 88th birthday this past October. Shulman and those around him, aware of the need to stake out his place in history, have recently drawn a lot of attention to his work. In 1996 a monograph by architectural historian Joseph Rosa on Shulman's architectural work was published by Rizzoli; the University of Southern California mounted an exhibition of his photographs in 1997; and articles about Shulman's work and legacy have appeared in many magazines. We should all be so fortunate to live out our retirement holding court at our studio, as Julius Shulman has lived the past several years, with the phone constantly ringing and a steady stream of people coming to visit and pay homage. With the increasing worldwide recognition of Modern architecture in Los Angeles and the contribution of those who worked here, Shulman's vast record of architecture has become an invaluable resource to publishers, scholars, journalists, and architects. He has become an integral part of that story, and many people's familiarity with modernist housing comes directly (and only) from his photographs. For years Shulman has wanted to weigh in with his own story, as he has now done with an autobiographical monograph from Taschen Press: Julius Shulman, Architecture and its Photography.
The editors at Taschen have clearly understood something key to the legend of Julius Shulman: it's not just the images themselves, but the story that he loves to tell which makes the narrative interesting. The reviewer was asked at a gathering of architectural enthusiasts, "So, how is the book?" to which she replied, "It's 100% Julius." The text has been edited with a very light hand, which makes reading it very close to experience of sitting with him in his Hollywood Hills studio and hearing
him tell the story himself, eyebrows raised, outstretched arms gesturing about him. This tone is set in the very personal and folksy preface to the book by Frank Gehry. Few such large, international presses would allow an author such a free voice, for better or for worse. Most readers will find the conversational tone charming and quite readable. Given his obvious passion and the mission he feels his work fulfills, Shulman's penchant for hyperbole is forgivable.
The book is very large, with generously sized 9" x 12" pages (300 of them), and very reasonably priced at $39.95. Excellent use has been made of this large format, with most photographs bleeding to the edges of the page. The comparison is inevitable between this book and that published
by Rizzoli, and Taschen's effort stands up well to that of their glossy competitor. The photographs in A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman are considerably smaller both because of the smaller page size and because of the book's layout. In this book, however, details which most of us have never seen are evident in an
enormous double-page spreads which are located throughout.
The book is also unusual in the way it injects color into this story.
It's ironic that the story of Los Angeles Modernism, in such a vividly colored city, has been told mainly through black and white photographs. Now that color publishing is so common and expected, color photographs are only now being reintegrated into Shulman's public oeuvre. Again, Rosa's book for Rizzoli includes fewer than half a dozen of Shulman's color views, whereas the present work has many dozens, well-integrated
with the traditional black and white world which we are used to seeing his work portray. The reader is treated to the bright blue of a swimming pool, the green of an exotic succulent, and the red of bougainvillea blossoms. Even among the black and white photographs, many of the pages themselves are yellow, peach, blue, pink or green behind the text.
In addition to this chromatic expansion, and even more important from an artistic standpoint, however, is the inclusion of several photographs of industrial subjects. The views of a newly-completed Hoover Dam (1936), a steel bridge in downtown Los Angeles (1933), and a wartime industrial
synthetic rubber factory (1943) are some of the highlights of the book, presented in a large, striking manner.
All of the old and well-known favorites are of course included, but for Los Angeles readers, this book is an excellent album of part of our architectural history, and will surely prove to be very popular, as it will for the legions of people worldwide who are interested in the architecture of Los Angeles despite the doubt of their friends and colleagues (and we salute you!). While there are many projects from around the world included, the California examples are really the best both as graphic images and as a record of important architecture. The book will certainly be of interest to architectural photographers as well, for Shulman's insight into the role of the photographer as interpreter and emissary between the architect, his or her work and the editors of publications through which architecture is commonly disseminated.
Taschen currently has several titles forthcoming which will reinforce the ranks of publications about the architecture of Los Angeles, including the work of Richard Neutra, Rudolph M. Schindler, Albert Frey, and John Lautner. Taschen has already expanded our collective horizons into the realm of the under-published with their many volumes of erotica, and this avenue into architecture with a West Coast emphasis is most welcome.
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