Iconic Images

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2000 by Catherine Slessor

A long-awaited Julius Shulman retrospective exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in London.

Over a career spanning eight decades, Julius Shulman has become one of the greatest architectural photographers of our age. Shulman's perfectly composed black and white photographs defined an era of post-war Californian Modernism; an era of social and technological optimism, of elegant, economical architecture, of hedonistic cocktail parties and languid, sun-drenched afternoons idling by the swimming pool.

Entirely self-taught, Shulman met Richard Neutra in 1936 and began by giving pictorial form to his experimental, utopian buildings, exploring photography's technical advances to distil the essence of architecture. He went on to record work by other Californian pioneers such as Koenig, Schindler, Ellwood and the Eames. The heroic night-time view of Koenig's Case Study House 22 perched vertiginously on a Los Angeles hillside with the blazing grid of the city spread out below, or Neutra's Kaufmann House, a fragile pavilion dramatically framed by the desert landscape are some of modern architecture's most enduring and compelling images.

Now, as part of the Altered States of America programme at London's Photographers' Gallery, a selection of Shulman's iconic pictures can be seen in a long overdue British exhibition. While the show could have benefited from a more generous setting (why not, for instance, at the RIBA?) it is still essential viewing; a magical synthesis of space, light and geometry.