Early on, Eric Bricker’s documentary, Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (out on DVD), makes an interesting point: we know and understand architecture more from its photographs than from any real encounter with the buildings. And yet, architecture is the art that gives the greatest shape to reality in its human-made dimension. Julius Shulman, whose photographic career began in Los Angeles in the 1920s, left one of the most extensive records of modern architects and their work, photographing Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Frank Gehry. At a time when many modernist buildings have fallen to the wrecking ball or the “improvements” of the McArchitecture generation, Shulman’s photos provide the best record of what was and what can be restored.
Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Shulman appreciated buildings that fit well into nature, used local materials or made good advantage of their environment. Shulman became an environmental activist early on and pointed the way to green building. He retired in the ‘90s, dismayed by postmodernism, which turned out to be mostly a cardboard, inelegant pastiche of the past. Curiously, some of the buildings Shulman loved never looked as beautiful as they did in his photographs, suggesting that he might have been a better artist than some of the architects he admired.
