RIP Julius Schulman

Today, we lost a legendary photographer - a photographer whose work the architectural photography world is greatly indebted to. His name: Julius Schulman. Here he is, photographing Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, and the fruit of his labour further below.

Shulman began his career in 1936 when he photographed a Richard Neutra house with a vest-pocket camera. He quickly moved on to shoot the work of many prominent architects who later became friends: Rudolf Schindler, Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, to name just a few. Shulman remains enthusiastic about architecture (Leo Marmol and Steve Ehrlich are just two of his contemporary favorites), but he’s a little perplexed by the current mania for all things sustainable. “We’ve always had green—those of us who are concerned with the environment,” he says. “So why should we suddenly discover that green is good?” When asked why Koenig never talked about his architecture as sustainable, Shulman says, “In the fifties and sixties it was done automatically. The term green meant you related to the environment. That’s all green means: you are the environment.”

“The reason why this architecture photographs so beautifully is the environmental consideration exercised by the architects,” Shulman says. “It was the sense that here we have beautiful canyons, hillsides, views of the ocean. Everyone loves these photographs because the houses are environmentally involved, and this was before the emphasis on what everyone is calling green.” (from Metropolis)

Schulman was 89 years old. There is a documentary of his work, called Visual Acoustics that is being screened at select cities currently. Do check it out.