Photographer Profile ~ Julius Shulman

Julius Shulman (October 10, 1910 – July 15, 2009) is considered to be the most important architectural photographer in history, best known for his iconic photographs of the Case Study Houses. Notably his CSH #22, The Stahl House designed by Pierre Koenig, was published many times as one of Shulman's best works. He was a pioneer of modern architecture photography, and helped mid century modern architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Pierre Koenig to get to wider audience.

For 70 years, Shulman steadily created one of the most comprehensive visual chronologies of modern architecture and the development of the Los Angeles region. The photographs in this post are selected from his portfolio of more than 70,000 images.

The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building's surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.

Today, a great many of the buildings documented by Shulman have disappeared or been crudely converted, but the thirst for his pioneering images is stronger than ever. [via wiki and other sources]

Julius Shulman's iconic image: Designed by Pierre Koenig in 1959 for Buck Stahl as part of the Case Study Houses sponsored by Arts & Architecture Magazine, the Stahl house achieved its fame, in part, due to Shulman’s iconic image. The glass house appears to levitate over the Los Angeles skyline. Shot at f32 on his 4x5 camera, he used two flash heads for the interior and kept the shutter open for 5 minutes to expose for the city lights.

Shulman setting up for the now iconic shot (with a very long sync cord)

 Shulman uses branches and plants to help frame the shot.

 Julius Shulman and architect Richard Neutra at the Tremaine House

Tremaine House
German born photographer Jürgen Nogai and Julius Shulman began a rewarding collaboration in 2000 which lasted almost a decade until Shulman's death in 2009. This is one of my favourite images and homes photographed by the duo. 

Winner of several awards including Best Documentary at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Lone Star Festival,‘Visual Acoustics – The Modernism of Julius Schulman’ is an elegant, considered and unreservedly lavish expose of the most prolific architectural photographer of our time.

This interview, conducted at the age of 98, and one of his last, shows the tremendous enthusiasm for photography and enduring spirit he had right up to the end of his amazing life.

Redwood Saw ~ By Photographer Richard Rothman

When the photographer Richard Rothman was making the work that became his latest book, “Redwood Saw,” what started out as a formalist approach to documenting the humbling landscape of the old-growth redwood forest in Northern California quickly turned into a project about a boom town gone bust. As Rothman explained last week at the International Center of Photography, he eventually had to leave his tent in the forest to buy supplies, and found himself in the nearby town of Crescent City. What he saw there inspired him to expand his project to portraits of the town’s people and of the architecture of a place that was once entirely redwoods. Through excessive mining, fishing, and lumbering, Crescent City had slowly depleted the base of its economy, and in his large-format portraits Rothman shows what was left behind. “I wanted to tell a larger story about the moment we are in, here in America,” Rothman explained, “paying attention to all that I could take in.” Here’s a look.

[via the new yorker]

Photographer Profile ~ Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1962. His first experience of photography, at the age of ten, was a Diane Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

As a teenager, he was part of a punk rock group called The Speedies that hit the New York scene in selling out shows all over town. Their hit song “Let Me Take Your Photo” proved to be prophetic to what Crewdson would become later in life. In 2005, Hewlett Packard used the song in advertisements to promote its digital cameras.

In the mid 1980s, Crewdson studied photography at SUNY Purchase, near Port Chester, NY. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Cooper Union, Vassar College, and Yale University where he has been on the faculty since 1993. He is now a professor at Yale University of the Arts.

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs usually take place in small town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. The photographs are shot using a large crew, and are elaborately staged and lighted. Working at a mind-boggling scale, Crewdson creates his highly crafted surreal images and are very cinematic. He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.

He apparently does everything in camera. Whatever it takes, he’ll build a set, create fog or rain. No cloning or CG is used to create these marvelously complex and compelling images. "a perfect moment "

Crewdson is represented in London at White Cube.

* please click on images for a larger view* recommended!

Yup that is Julianne Moore

"... I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire. "~ Crewdson

 

"Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures. "~ Crewdson

"The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst. " ~ Crewdson

 Six Feet Under cast

" I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there’s always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense… This is what drives you to the next picture. "~ Crewdson

"Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it’s instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth. " ~ Crewdson

"My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear. " ~ Crewdson

" All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I’m looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery. " ~ Crewdson

"…the photograph is still and frozen. From day one, I have been interested in taking that limitation and trying to find the strength in it—like a story that is forever frozen in between moments, before and after, and always left as a kind of unresolved question. " ~ Crewdson

On set with the Crewdson crew

Gregory Crewdson with his 8x10 camera

Check out this Aperture feature on Crewdson: http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/

The Speedies "Let Me Take Your Photo" (1979) 

with Gregory Crewdson!

I think he's on guitar,  but I'm not sure which one he is however. If anyone knows shoot me a message