If Southern California and its culture were built on salesmanship, Julius Shulman sold the place as well as anyone.
The hugely influential architectural photographer, who died Wednesday at 98, turned snapshots of the region's buildings -- in particular, Modernist houses by Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner and others -- into crisply alluring campaigns for life in sunny, cosmopolitan and forward-looking Los Angeles.
If that makes him appear as much businessman as visionary -- well, Shulman himself confronted that very suggestion over the years and rarely voiced more than a smiling, half-hearted objection to it. He would tell you without hesitation that he was a booster for Los Angeles -- and, indeed, when a generation of photographers who favored grittier depictions of the city came along in the 1970s, he didn't try to hide his disdain for their approach.
What he wouldn't say -- since promotion rather than self-promotion was his preferred mode of making his way in the world -- is that he turned boosterism into an art form. In the bargain, he changed the course not only of Los Angeles history but also of the architectural profession.
His career dovetailed neatly with the rise of residential modern architecture as a consumable art form -- a product to be ogled, and dreamed about, as surely as any model in the pages of a fashion magazine. He ought to be recognized as the man who made Dwell magazine and Design Within Reach possible. And maybe even the world-famous, globe-trotting class of designers known as starchitects.
Shulman's vision of modern, stylish domesticity was in many respects an airbrushed one. It's hard to believe anybody actually ever lived the way the carefully posed models in his photographs seemed to, carrying a tray out onto a poolside terrace, or sitting in perfectly pressed suits and dresses on the edge of a Mies van der Rohe chaise longue, city lights twinkling in the distance.
But his images were impossible to resist as a kind of mythmaking, even for the most tough-minded observers of life in Los Angeles. To look for any length of time at a Shulman picture of a great modern L.A. house is to get a little drunk on the idea of paradise as an Edenic combination of spare architecture and lush landscape.
There was certainly nothing insincere about Shulman's efforts to promote the notion that such a lifestyle was easily acquired in Southern California in the decades after World War II. He himself lived in idyllic and architecturally pedigreed surroundings, in a steel-framed house he commissioned from Raphael Soriano.
