Case Study #22
While the architect Pierre Koenig nervously directed the last-minute placement of furniture, Julius calmly ran his practiced eye around the rooms of Case Study #22, determining the best ways to communicate the daring volume of the floor plan—a minimalist L-shaped box of steel and glass—in just two dimensions for the magazine readers. He had decided on a “constructed view” of the bedroom, placed the tripod, and walked out onto the patio while his assistant Leland Lee placed the lights. In an instant, Julius changed his mind and told Lee what to do. Koenig’s assistants, two architecture students from USC, had brought their girlfriends upon Julius’s request--he preferred models to empty rooms. Ann Lightbody and Cynthia Murfee had been conversing and lounging in the cantilevered living room, suspended over a 100-foot precipice, awaiting orders. They didn’t need to be placed. They had found the right place on their own accord, and Julius knew that was the best compliment they could pay to the architect. (Julius Shulman on Case Study #22, Audio)
Julius had stopped using a light meter before the Second World War. “Just a crutch” he always said. “A photographer should know how much light each type of film requires.” Only a few people have ever known so infallibly how to set the aperture and shutter speed to optimize highlights and shadow detail. “One Shot Shulman,” his publisher later called him. No light meter, no guessing, no back-up shots, and no mistakes. Julius looked southward from the heights of the Hollywood Hills into the enormous night of Los Angeles, the streetlights along the major arteries etching a white grid into the inky blackness of neighborhoods without end. Seven and half minutes, he decided. He positioned Lee inside with a strobe and a hand on the wall switch for the globe lights. The room needed to be dark while Julius exposed the cityscape. After those seven and a half minutes, Yee momentarily illuminated Lightbody, Murfee, and the interior.[1]
The “Two Girls” picture is most probably the most widely published architectural photograph of all time, but Julius didn’t set out to make a masterpiece. He saw an extraordinary composition and knew it was special when he made it. But it was only marginally special compared with his enormous output of powerful images. Thousands of successful compositions had brought him this moment, in which a slight elevation of his craft could achieve an enduring cultural icon. Despite his admitted artistry, Julius never claimed to be anything other than a commercial photographer who specialized in modernist architecture. “I’m good,” he says without conceit, “and I work fast.” Neither did he name his images like a fine art photographer. He only refers to this image as “The Two Girls” in order to distinguish it from the many other images organized under the same job number. When published, it is simply captioned as “Stahl Residence (Pierre Koenig, 1960).” When an editor calls on the phone to ask for an image of, say Lautner’s Chemosphere House, Shulman will ask, “you mean the one where the cloud shadow falls across the center of the valley?”
The Two Girls image achieves something very typical of his opus. It dramatically represents the floor plan in ways that are extremely flattering to the architect, and it also transcends the architectural moment to depict the larger cultural milieu from which it arose. It not only denotes the design; it connotes the spirit of the age. “The Two Girls” marks the epochal transition in North America from the affluent society of the 1950s to the tumultuous conflicts of 1960s. It also encapsulates the contradictions of the postwar America. Reclining in perfect comfort and elegance within a showcase, the two girls, almost indistinguishable from manikins in a Macy’s window, are the epitome of the consumer society that had triumphed by the 1950s. Protected and suspended by the technological economy that had just defeated every menace of the world, they project confidence unbounded by the walls of tradition.
John F. Kennedy charismatically brought this faith in American technology, to Los Angeles in August for the Democratic Party National Convention in the Biltmore Hotel, where dazzled party hacks nominated him for the presidency. Superman had come to the supermarket, in Norman Mailer’s unforgettable formula. Kennedy’s stirring example unleashed an unbounded optimism among the Baby Boomers, to solve every remaining problem that history had thrust upon the U.S., at home and abroad. The modernist will was set to extinguish the limitations of the past. In this way, the hubris of bolting a glass house to a cliff one hundred meters above Sunset Boulevard shared a kinship with the hubris of a dozen black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who forced an end to segregated Woolworth’s lunch counters.
“The Two Girls” picture projects the optimism of the 1950s into the 1960s. But the “Two Girls Picture” is also darkly prophetic. Shulman by 1960 had perfected a graphic style built from the bold tension between sharply-contrasted blacks and whites. He drew from the intrinsic rectilinear shapes of the modernist design an even more dramatic compositional geometry. Magazine editors developed an insatiable appetite for his images, which practically jumped off the page. Architects loved his work because he understood how to create a sense of three dimensions within the two dimensions of still photography. Using the geometrical corrective (and distorting) capacities of the view camera, Shulman knew just how to straighten the lines bent by normal ocular perspective and how to accentuate an angle, always remaining true to the spirit (if not strictly the reality) of the plan itself.
In the “Two Girls Picture” these aesthetic techniques spoke unconsciously to the looming gulf and lingering injustice of North American society. Los Angeles in 1960 was as sharply segregated socially as Shulman’s photography was graphically. Two white women, encased in a protective glass case, are suspended over a black city. They are located in an explicitly segregated white neighborhood. People of color could not live there no matter how much money they had. Ironically, the white-owned banks had refused to mortgage Koenig’s daring design, so the African-American owned Broadway Federal Savings and Loan, thinking more rationally about the promise of such designs, and hungrier for affluent clients, stepped into the breach. Koenig excitedly “came up one night,” recalls Buck Stahl, “and he says well, I think I found a mortgage company. That is, if you don’t mind the color of it. It’s a hundred percent black.” “I don’t care what color they are,” Buck replied, “so long as the color of their money is green.”[2] Such are the cultural contradictions of capitalism.
The dramatic gesture of the loan from African American capitalists of Broadway Federal was to sink into obscurity, however, compared with the social inferno that lay ahead. Stretching as far as the eye can see below the elevated and showcased white ladies is a black city. Six hundred thousand African Americans, one hundred thousand Mexican Americans, and sixty thousand Asians inhabited the neighborhoods in the background to the left of center in “The Two Girls.” Unrepentant injustice, in the form of housing and school discrimination and in the form of daily police brutality, was endured for five more years. In August of 1965 the optimism of the 1950s modernism went up in the smoke of a thousand buildings burning—their architectural design quite beside the point.
[1] Interview with Julius Shulman by Philip J. Ethington, 11 April 2001.
[2] Interview with Charlotta and Clarence Henry “Buck” Stahl, by Philip J. Ethington, 9 May 2001.
This page has paths:
- Topoi: Hollywood Sign, Port of Los Angeles, Case Study #22, and Watts Towers Phil Ethington
- structured media gallery test Curtis Fletcher
- Places and Paths of Los Angeles Phil Ethington
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
