[.ca] Julius Shulman, Modernism Rediscovered (ISBN 3822842877)

Shulman Modernism:
A fittingly huge tribute to the man who captured Modernism in western America and especially in California. I thought the beauty of these three huge books was the way they are organized: historically using Shulman's own job reference numbers. Obviously there is not going to be a photo of every commission because a lot of his time was spent on what he calls `bread and butter work'. So book 1 starts with #0003 in 1939 with Gregory Ain's Scheyer residence in LA and book 3 ends in 1981 with #5976 Augustin Hernandez's studio in Mexico City. Although Shulman is working again, with German photographer Juergen Nogai, the contents of the three books are based on the 250,000 negatives he presented to the Getty Research Institute upon retiring in 2004. I get the impression looking through the pages that there maybe more interior photos than exteriors but what a visual treat these interiors are. In photo after photo, there is a sense of spaciousness so typical of most modernist houses and many of the shots are taken to show how rooms extend into other living areas. The interiors from the Forties to the late Seventies also yield a fascinating opportunity to study the furniture and fittings the owners thought would work well in a modern home. Owing to the large page size some of these domestic interior photos are twenty-three inches wide on a spread so the detail is amazing. Another interesting point about a Shulman photo is the addition of people in his work. Apparently frowned upon at the time by architects but he took the view that it was an opportunity to reduce the purity (and possibly elitism) of Modernism in a domestic setting. Amongst all the great home photos commercial work covers corporate headquarters of large companies, schools, research facilities, banks, retail units and restaurants. The same sense of space and depth comes across in these images and I think you'll come to the same conclusion as I did about Shulman's photography: that he always managed to frame his compositions to captured the essence of a building. The production of the three books is exemplary as you would expect from Taschen. The hundreds of photos are printed on quality paper with a 200dpi screen presented in an elegant but simple layout. Each featured commission has between one and six photos with a short piece of background copy. All of this is a wonderful tribute to a remarkable architectural photographer. I know I'll be enjoying these three books for a long, long time.