Visual Acoustics

Shulman was around so long that he even got to weigh in on Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. He was skeptical once but came to love it.

Associated with the modernist architectural movement centered in Southern California during the mid-20th century, Shulman’s still photographs are essential to any study of the style’s vast popularization and commercialism.

Shulman photographed buildings as if they were movie stars: He found their best angles and immortalized them.

Nominally about the life and career of landmark Southern California architectural photographer Julius Shulman, but it's more about the buildings he photographed than it is about him. Which is probably the way he'd like it.

It’s about lovely photographs of graceful buildings and those who can afford the real estate. But it does pay proper respect to a deserving artist.

Visual Acoustics goes out of its way to remain as kindly and pleasing as Shulman himself.

This documentary tells this story reasonably well, though one might question whether director Eric Bricker's jazzy montages, collages, and rapid camera movements are appropriate to the contemplation of still photographs.