It was a chance meeting with Neutra in March 1936 -- two weeks after Shulman left Berkeley -- that would open up the possibility of becoming an architectural photographer. A man who was renting a room from Shulman's sister, and who was working as a draftsman for Neutra, invited Shulman along one day to see Neutra's Kun house, which was under construction near Fairfax Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.As was his habit by then, Shulman took along a vest-pocket camera that was equipped with a bellows that unfolded.
"I had never seen a modern house before," Shulman said. It "intrigued me with its strange forms -- beyond any previous identity of a house in my experience."
Shulman developed a few of the pictures and sent them to the draftsman, who showed them to Neutra. The architect, then in his mid-40s, sent for young Shulman and ordered up more prints.
With Neutra's invitation to photograph other projects, Shulman was suddenly a professional architecture photographer.
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But the image that would secure Shulman's reputation was of Koenig's Case Study House #22, a glass and steel-frame home built for Carlotta and Buck Stahl in the Hollywood Hills above Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Shulman shot the photo as the sun was setting on May 9, 1960.
The black-and-white photograph is taken from outside the cantilevered house, shooting through glass walls to the grid of sparkling city lights below. In the living room are two pretty women dressed for a special night out but, for the moment, sitting quietly and chatting. The strong horizontal pattern of the ceiling over their heads extends outside to the house's overhang.
The effect, though Hollywood gorgeous, is casual, a snapshot of the good life. But, like all of Shulman's work, nothing about taking this photograph was casual.
"He was doing a rush job of shooting the house the day before it was to have its debut," Ethington said. "He turned around and saw this scene."
To capture the image in the camera, however, Shulman had to essentially take two photographs at once -- one of the vista below, which required a time exposure, and one of the house, which required a flash.
Working quickly and without a light meter, Shulman shot a 7½-minute exposure of the city lights with his 4-by-5 camera.
"Then, when I felt I had given enough time for the exposure, and I wanted to flash the interior, I called to the girls," Shulman told Taina Rikala De Noriega for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution. "I said, 'Girls, sit up now and look pleasant. Look toward each other as if you're talking and hold still for just a second and the flash will go off.' I pressed the release. All this time the shutter was open and the flash illuminated the interior."
The result is, as UCLA's Hines said, a photograph that is both time-specific and timeless. With its scenic setting, romantic sensibility and strong perspective, it seems to capture the best of Modernism.
"Modernism really was about a belief in a promising future, a belief that our problems could be solved easily by progress," said Krull, whose gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica represents Shulman's work. Krull said he saw the uplifting diagonal of Shulman's photograph, much like the fins on 1950s cars, as having an "optimistic flair."
Others, including Ethington, have seen something darker.
While conceding that the photo is both "comfortable and thrilling," he said it also has a "portentous feel of white, well-to-do women encased in a glass box above a dark and teeming city."
Shulman knew he had taken a great picture, but he could not have known how enduring it would be. First published on the cover of the Sunday Pictorial section of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner two months after it was taken, it would make architectural stars of both Shulman and Koenig. It has been reproduced countless times in books, magazines and newspapers.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 16 July 2009 21:01 (sixteen years ago)