Visual Acoustics

Yesterday I watched Visual Acoustics, a documentary by Eric Bricker on the modernism photography of Julius Shulman.  What an excellent movie that really captured Julius's sense of humor and his brilliant talent in architecture photography.  He is known for the photograph of the "Case Study house #22" shot in 1945, which is the second image above.  I've always thought the photograph was spectacular, to achieve that quality for an evening shot, then being able to capture the interior lighting and street lights of the Los Angeles background the way he did was remarkable.  Shulman's photographs are seen everywhere while I think most people pass them by, and don't really appreciate the skill and artistic eye behind the work.  I feel it's because his images were so perfect that they look simple to achieve, but quite the opposite.  As Julius say's in the film. "I have control over the visual acoustics."  This control made him the leading photographer of architecture of his time, and possibly still.