City and Guilds 7512: Julius Shulman

Julius was a very well respected architectural photographer from America, who is best known for his photograph of Case Study House #22, which is shown below (row 1, column 1), who sadly died on 15th July 2009.

Julius was an architectural photographer who’s architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's or Pierre Koenig's remarkable structures, have been published countless times.

Julius was born on 10th October 1910, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His family soon moved to a farm in Connecticut. Shulman said that's where he learned about lights and shadows and developed a love of nature.

When Julius was 10, his family moved to Los Angeles and opened a dry goods store. His father died of tuberculosis in 1923, leaving his mother with their five children and the business.

Julius attended Roosevelt High School, where he took his lone photography class. He spent the next several years soul searching and earning his rent money by taking photos with an Eastman box camera. One picture of a bridge won first place in a national magazine contest.

It was a casual meeting with architect Richard Neutra in 1936 that launched Julius’s career in architectural photography.

The brilliant design and style of buildings like those by Charles Eames, and Richard Neutra, was first brought to peoples attention by Julius's photography. The detail in the photographs of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each of Julius’s architectural photographs brings together the perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building's surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.

Today, a great many of the buildings documented by Julius have disappeared or been crudely converted, which is why I wanted to capture photographs of some of the buildings in Burton On Trent, before some of them suffer the same fate.

Julius’s mission was to use his photography to build the reputation of architects who were bringing innovative design to the West.

Examples of Julius’s work