"JUILUS SCHULMAN COLOR" Hardcover Book | Mid-Century Modern Photography

JUILUS SCHULMAN COLOR Hardcover Book

Author David Wills
Foreword by Marvin Heiferman

304 pages
Dimensions are approx. 14" x 11" x 1.5"
Published 2025

“Color offers perhaps the most gratifying and certainly the most expressive medium in photography, [with its] unlimited opportunities to explore and experiment.” JULIUS SHULMAN

The acknowledged titan of mid-twentieth-century architectural photography, Julius Shulman is most often associated with his influential work in monochrome—black, white, and all shades of gray in between—a fact that has often overshadowed his mastery of lighting, composing, and producing spectacular color images.
During a career that spanned eight decades, Shulman traveled throughout the continental US, Hawaii, Canada, Central and South America, Israel, and Asia, capturing in brilliantly deployed color important residential, commercial, and civic structures.

Documenting the modernist century—from Bauhaus to brutalism—Shulman as pictorial historian utilized the glorious spectrum of Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and Ansco Safety Film to immortalize the work of architects Richard Neutra, R. M. Schindler, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, Paul R. Williams, Eero Saarinen, John Lautner, Welton Becket, William L. Pereira, Bruce Goff, Moshe Safdie, Ricardo Legoretta, Agustín Hernández Navarro, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson, among others.

As the unofficial visual profiler of Southern California’s Case Study House initiative of the late 1940s through the early 1960s, Shulman achieved unique status. In black and white—and vivid color—he photographed the post, beam, and glass of homes created by notable architects, including Craig Ellwood and Raphael Soriano, the Eames House (CSH #8); the Bass House (CSH #20B) by Buff, Straub & Hensman; and Pierre Koenig’s famous cantilevered Stahl House (CSH #22). In 2005, his now-iconic color image of Koenig’s Bailey House (CSH #21)—featuring a couple posing as suburban sophisticates—was paid tribute by Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and photographer Steven Klein in a major feature for W magazine.

Shulman’s luminous images of Palm Springs—featuring landmarks designed by Albert Frey, Palmer & Krisel, Donald Wexler, William F. Cody, E. Stewart Williams, and A. Quincy Jones—now define the resort city’s cultural profile and its role as a seminal catalyst in the rediscovery of the mid-century modern movement, as well as its preservation and restoration.
Of the many Julius Shulman photography exhibitions staged and books published about the photographer’s oeuvre, none have focused on Shulman’s color photography—until now.

JULIUS SHULMAN COLOR is the ultimate monograph of the photographer’s work in analog color, realized through a wealth of unpublished and never-before-seen photographs—most scanned (by the Getty Research Institute) from their original color transparencies—and presented here together for the first time.

SBN: 978-1-954193-12-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023917515