OHH MR. JULIUS

For those of you who don't know who Julius Shulman is, you need to wake up and look out your window. As my friends have heard me say, I like to call him, "the godfather of architectural photography." His images of California modern architecture defined the 20th Century. One of his most famous photographs is one called Case Study House #22 taken in Los Angeles, 1960. The photograph is breathtaking. Lets just say, if you decided to strike up a conversation about the modern architecture movement and not mention Julius name, well, that would be like talking about Back to the Future and leaving out the time machine part...big mistake.

For the last couple weeks I have literally been counting the days to see Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, a documentary chronicling the monumental photographers career. The film recently won the audience award for best documentary feature at the 2009 Palm Springs Film Festival. It's absolutely amazing, sweet to the core, and funny in its own right (guess you gotta know Julius!). Dustin Hoffman does a fantastic job narrating the film, with great direction from Eric Bricker. The doc roughly follows chronological form from Shulman's family moving to Southern California in the early 20s, his early commissions with architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, a generous section devoted to Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #22, his collaboration with Mexican architect Abraham Zabludovsky, to a wonderfully emotional section documenting the transportation of Julius' massive archive to the Getty Museum, and finally a little commentary from Julius about post modernism that he basically holds in contempt.

The man himself was to make an appearance, but pulled out last minute. No harm though, he was kind enough to leave 30 or so signed copies of his book, Julius Shulman: Modernism Rediscovered at the LACMA bookstore. As soon as the lights went up after the screening, I quickly ran to the store and snagged a copy. It's a beautiful book, representing the spirit of the 50s and 60s architectural design that pays tribute to the lesser-known yet outstanding contributions to the modern movement. A must have for any fan.

Later that night I was struck with some inspiration.

Amanda thought I was a little crazy, but I staged our living and dinning room area, snapped a couple dozen frames with my D200 using an SB-900 as an off camera flash. I wanted to go for a deep depth of field so I set the aperture to f/16 and held the shutter open for around two seconds. All and all the shot turned out pretty well, no Julius yet, but getting there.