MOVIES

'Visual Acoustics' tracks the photographic rise of modernism

By Charles Ealy
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, October 16, 2008

In the foreword to 1998's biographical study "Pierre Koenig," internationally acclaimed architect Norman Foster marveled over a photograph of Koenig's Stahl House in Los Angeles. "If I had to choose one snapshot, one architectural moment, of which I would like to have been the author, this is surely it."

The "author" of that photograph is the subject of a documentary that, along with Oliver Stone's "W.," will help open the Austin Film Festival tonight. Directed by Eric Bricker, the documentary is titled "Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman."

Although Shulman might not be a household name in America, his photography has probably been sitting on your — or your parents' — coffee table at some point during the past 50 years.

Throughout his career, Shulman, now 97, has helped capture the beautiful

simplicity and elegance of mid-century modern homes \— and helped turn the architects with whom he worked into international stars.

"Early on, his architectural clients realized that they couldn't pick up a house and take it on a tour to show what they had done," Bricker says. "But they began to understand that photographic images could spread the word worldwide. Julius was the one they turned to."

Shulman's photograph of the Stahl House, also known as "Case Study #22," has been the inspiration for modern architecture around the world and helped define the 20th-century image of Los Angeles.

"There, hovering almost weightlessly above the bright lights of Los Angeles, spread out like a carpet below, is an elegant, light, economical and transparent enclosure whose apparent simplicity belies the rigorous process of investigation that made it possible," Foster wrote of the Stahl House in the foreword to the Koenig biography by James Steele and David Jenkins.

As Foster knew, the image of the Stahl House didn't just come into being, and it really wasn't a "snapshot." Shulman's great insight was recognizing that the linear lines of the house's dramatic overhang were in perfect harmony with the street grids of Los Angeles below.

And, as watchers of tonight's documentary will learn, Shulman used time-lapse photography to capture the twinkling, 1960 streetscape, making the image far more than an effortless snapshot.

Although the photograph of the Koenig-designed home is the most famous of Shulman's images, the photographer was more closely associated with architect Richard Neutra, who grew up in Vienna and came to the United States in the 1920s, where he became known as the top architect for a new International Style of modernism.

Neutra, who spotted Shulman's keen eye for illuminating architectural drama, worked with the photographer until his death in 1970.

It all started in 1936, when Shulman became friendly with one of Neutra's assistants and took along a camera during a visit to a recently completed Neutra project in Los Angles.

Shulman's resulting photographs, which were passed along to Neutra, delighted the architect, who said they "revealed the essence of my design." Thus began Shulman's career of photographing homes with strong geometric compositions, often with glass and steel frames and with the surrounding landscapes as dramatic backdrops.

One of the most famous projects with Neutra was Shulman's photography of a home built for P.M. Lovell, which became known as the Health House because of its relationship with nature. Shulman's photography captured its dramatic perch over the Pacific Ocean and helped make it one of the most iconic homes in America, leading to its eventual role in the movie "L.A. Confidential."

As mass-market magazines in the 1950s and early '60s began to recognize the importance of modernism's emergence, Shulman became one of the leading purveyors of the "Southern California lifestyle" for publications such as Life, Look, Time, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and House and Garden.

Over the years, he took thousands of photographs of the projects of nearly every top modern architect in America, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Gregory Ain, Albert Frey, Paul Laszlo, Raphael Soriano, John Lautner and Craig Ellwood. His archives of more than 250,000 negatives and contact prints, which were transferred to the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities in the early 2000s, have become a major source for the scholars of architectural modernism, with major retrospective exhibitions being held worldwide.

Bricker, the director of "Visual Acoustics," stumbled upon the iconic photographer and his architectural treasures by chance.

In 1999, Bricker was working as an art consultant in Los Angeles and needed photographs of 1930s San Francisco for an installation. And as it turned out, his landlord was a neighbor of Shulman and suggested a visit.

Bricker says he and Shulman hit it off immediately. "I was astounded not only by his photography but also by his spirit," Bricker says. And shortly thereafter, Bricker says, he began his own "epic journey" \— to make a documentary about Shulman.

"I had never made a movie, not even a short," Bricker says. But Shulman's strong "sense of humanism, his belief that people's lives can be changed for the better by architecture," inspired Bricker to set off on a documentary project that took more than six years to complete.

Bricker says he's mindful that some critics might think Shulman's photographs helped fetishize "modern consumerism," and that they may be viewed as depicting an Anglicized world of 1950s-style "personal utopias."

But Bricker strongly defends Shulman's work against such criticisms.

"The intent is what's important. The aesthetic came from the intent," Bricker says. "Shulman wasn't trying to make you want to acquire things. He and the architects he worked with truly believed that architecture could ennoble the soul, could make your life better, and that such homes could be within the economic reach of the average citizen."

cealy@statesman.com; 445-3931.