Julius Shulman
[Photographer, b. 1910, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Los Angeles.]
I sell architecture better and more directly and more vividly than the architect does... The average architect is stupid. He doesn’t know how to sell. He’s not a merchandiser. He doesn’t know how to express his own image. He doesn’t know how to create a design of his image... And I do it. I’ve done it all my career over half a century, and it gets better.
I’m not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.
And I was very successful at baby photography... Strange isn’t it? Because some of my portraits of babies were— I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn’t use flash. We didn’t have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object—an inanimate object, for that matter.
The key to my work is that I stopped, physically, to observe something. I raised my camera and recorded my observations.
