Summary: Visual Acoustics, The Modernism of Julius Shulman is a new documentary film about architectural photographer Julius Shulman. The film opened November 6 in select cities. (The film opened last month in New York City.) Visual Acoustics traces Shulman’s career as a prolific architectural photographer who captured the Modernist movement, notably Modernist structures in Southern California. Shulman’s photographs captured the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry among others. Shulman died in July at 98. Visual Acoustics is directed by Eric Ricker and narrated by Dustin Hoffman.

Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22, by Julius Shulman, 1960. (Property of the J. Paul Getty Trust.)

Visual Acoustics celebrates the life and career of Shulman and highlights his images of the work of virtually every Modern architect since the 1930s, including Richard Neutra, Rudolph M. Schindler, and Pierre Koenig. It was Shulman who shot the iconic photo of Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22, perched on a Hollywood Hills slope and extending out over the night sky, with two young women, Cynthia Tindle and Ann Lightbody, Shulman artfully and enigmatically posed as if chatting. The film blends these images with interviews, such as with architect Frank Gehry, whose Disney Hall was among the last in Shulman’s enormous portfolio of indelible images.