One of my post-dissertation research projects will deal with people's sense of place in a city that doesn't seem to invite them to take emotional ownership of the larger city. It may work for a neighborhood--but who loves Los Angeles as a city the way many residents love New York, London, Montreal, or Paris? (I'm being western-centric, but that's a whole other set of research projects; for now I have to refer to places I know well enough.)The first time I went to L.A., I was fully prepared to hate it. Instead, I was fascinated--a response that doesn't exclude hate, I guess, but I've really come to like the city as a ragged, fragmented whole. It has to be impossible to know and understand Los Angeles the way one can know and understand places like New York. Psychogeographical approaches work differently there. Walking is a very different, but not impossible, undertaking (see Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking, 2008). The layers of history may be horizontal rather than vertical. And so on.
Much of my fascination has to do with the California-style modernist architecture that helps define the Los Angeles cityscape, even when it's hidden away like Julius Shulman's own 1950 steel-frame house. And much of what I know about this architecture comes from Shulman's clean and well-angled photography that makes such smart use of the Southern Californian sky and light. Some of his pictures of Case Study Houses, especially Pierre Koenig's #22, have become as iconic as the buildings themselves. While he's best known for his work in and around L.A., Shulman's collection of more than a quarter million negatives, prints, and slides (held by the Getty Research Institute) includes images from all over the United States. Shulman died in Los Angeles on July 16, 2oo9.
I just tried to find a copy of Eric Bricker's 2008 documentary Visual Acoustics but it doesn't seem to be out on DVD yet.
Edris House, Palm Springs (1953): Julius Shulman/The Palm Springs Modern Committee
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