Julius Shulman

Long Beach Pioneer Oil Field, 1933

Recent gelatin silver print

3 ½ x 2 ½” (image)

10 x 8” (paper)

14 ¼ x 11 ¾” (frame)

Julius Shulman is an architectural photographer renowned for producing some of the most iconic photographs in architectural history. He was born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York and moved to Los Angeles at the age of ten. Photography transitioned from a hobby to a professional career after he was discovered and encouraged by Richard Neutra, one of modernism’s most important architects. Shulman’s works provided a new perspective on photographic architecture. Before Shulman, pictures of buildings were merely pictures of buildings: following the modernist sensibility, photographers were expected to capture only the form of the edifice, rather than its function. Shulman overthrew that modernist expectation by turning buildings into a new subject for photography, being able to introduce an element of humanity, showing that these establishments could be lived in.