Julius Shulman

I live in a 30s, Spanish-style house in West Hollywood, with crown mouldings, arched doorways, wrought-iron sconces, elaborate tilework, and stained glass. The furnishings are eclectic: I think of them as new ornamentalist crossed with the creative salvage aesthetic. I am pleased with the effect I make seated on my pale green velvet couch, especially when I am wearing blue. Until I saw Julius Shulman's photographs, I imagined I lived a tasteful life.

I study Shulman's 1960 photograph of two women, both wearing white, very soignée, seated in the all-glass living room of their Hollywood Hills home. A view of the fabled lights of Los Angeles is spread out beneath them. The sharp lines of their cantilevered dwelling are echoed in the precise geometry of the furniture. I admire the discipline with which the biomorphic has been shunned. I think the women are laughing. It is night. They may be smoking. I wonder if they are as narcissistic as I am. They certainly have cause to be smug. I am forced to admit that their life looks infinitely more elegant than my own.

Shulman is an architectural photographer, probably the pre-eminent photographer of early California modernism. Long associated with Richard Neutra, Shulman documented the famous Case Study House Program, as well as work by R.M. Schindler, Raphael Soriano, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others in Southern California from the 30s through the 80s.

To refer to Schulman as a documentarian, however is clearly a misnomer. Part-empiricist, part-fabulist, Schulman makes pictures that look like the real world - only more so. The ostensible subject of his spare, black and white images at Craig Krull Gallery is architectural space; their actual subject is how architecture constructs ideal space. Along with Neutra's open-terraced constructions, Charles and Ray Eames' light, steel-skeleton cores, and Pierre Koenig's dramatically jutting roofs, Shulman's images illustrate how, in the post-war period, architecture became a metaphor for modernity. Perhaps more accurately, they illustrate how architecture became the backdrop against which the ideology of the modern was enacted.

Hollywood perfected this ideology, and indeed, the classical Hollywood cinema - which totalises, while allowing for no superfluity - provides a reference point for Shulman's imagery. In these photographs, nothing is accidental. This goes for the lighting, which is manipulated to heighten the drama of the forms - and the props, each of which is selected with palpable care; a pair of Eames chairs; Natzler bowls placed just so; a copy of Glamour magazine on a coffee table, providing a barely subliminal cue; laughing women in Claire McCardell sportswear installed not to attest to scale, but to authenticate a total lifestyle.

Shulman's favourite perspective - from the outside peering in - puts one in mind of Rear Window, a film which likewise instantiates a post-1945 vision of modernity, both in terms of its thematics (Cold War paranoia) and its sexual politics (the threat posed to masculinity by the sexually liberated woman). Like the windows in Hitchcock's invented apartment complex, each of Schulman's photographs is both a frame and an occasion for voyeurism. Yet every once in a while, Shulman reverses the camera's perspective, so that the outside world is seen from within. These images are designed to afford sweeping views of the landscape, and thereby to exemplify the continuity between interior and exterior space so prized by modernist architecture. Yet ironically, they transform landscape into spectacle, to be consumed at a safe distance. Pressed behind thick walls of glass, the mountains, valleys and deserts of Southern California are airless, and forever fixed in time.

Despite their obvious seductions, there has long been a reluctance to consider Shulman's photographs works of art. Instead they have been deemed ancillary material, part of the multi-limbed institutional apparatus which props up the real art - in this case, the architecture of Neutra, Schindler, et al. Certainly Shulman's photographs make modest claims. On a structural level, they mimic nothing so much as the installation shot, which pictures an art object in situ, rather than in the eternal non-space of the archive. Yet in point of fact, the installation shot is anything but innocent, as Louise Lawler's work elegantly demonstrates. It is an ideologically coded form, which reifies the strange pas de deux of legitimation that occurs between precious objects and those who choose to collect them.

And so, Shulman's photographs - themselves rather precious insofar as they envision a world in microcosm - return us to the question of vanity; who can lay claim to the desire these architectural tableaux display? A 1947 photograph of the von Sternburg house in Northridge, designed by Neutra twelve years earlier, is particularly interesting in this regard. Shot from the roof line with the camera looking down onto the backyard, the photograph is self-consciously cubist - the lines sharply perpendicular, the space highly fractured. Yet is this Shulman's artistry, or Neutra's? And what of the owner of the house, the writer Ayn Rand (hardly the self-effacing type), seated in the garden, very conspicuously entertaining her guests? Rand's presence radically shifts the terms of the image, like the donor in Renaissance paintings who is always absurdly close to Jesus and the saints.

Of Shulman, Neutra once stated: 'His work will survive me. Film is stronger and good glossy prints are easier to ship than brute concrete, stainless steel, or even ideas.' And indeed, the von Sternburg house has been destroyed. Shulman's art, however, ensures that Neutra's will survive, if only as a fragment of someone else's fantasy.