An architect’s success is dependent upon the photographs taken of his design. The success of Modernist architecture, which arose after the Second World War, is largely dependent upon one man: Julius Shulman. Visual Acoustics, a documentary narrated by Dustin Hoffman and directed by Eric Bicker, turns the camera around to better understand the man behind the lens.

Shulman, who died last July at age 98, is considered by many as the most influential architectural photographers of all time. Shulman believed wholeheartedly that his career in photography was a destined inevitability. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man with his family and it was in the “city of angels” that he uncovered his true talent. What started as a mere hobby to explore his new home quickly spiraled into a passion for the art of photography. At 23 years of age, Shulman’s parents presented him with his very first camera, an Eastman Kodak. Three years later, in 1936, architect Richard Neutra recognized Shulman’s raw talent, launching a career that would last over 70 years and would document some of the most prominent architectural masterpieces of 20th century modernism.

Shulman is most praised for his ability to capture not only the aesthetics of a building, but its very essence. In every photograph he made the home into a dynamic statement of architecture. Only years after Neutra’s initial discovery, Shulman was a common name in the architecture world. Shulman’s lens was able to capture the visual dynamics of a home in addition to the architect’s intentions and thoughts about each aspect the design. Shulman usually incorporated neighbors, the architects’ girlfriends, and crewmen and sometime even his own furniture into his photographs to illustrate how the house would look like as a home.

He is perhaps best known for his photograph of “Case Study House # 22,” a glass house precariously perched on the Hollywood Hills. It was part of a case study project for architects to design homes that were as visually innovation as they were suited for practical living. Furthermore, Shulman is also responsible for publicizing much of Neutra’s work in addition to that of Neutra’s contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, after seeing Shulman’s photographs of his Taliesin house in Wisconsin, Wright sent Shulman a letter, in which he remarked, “Your photos are incredible for an amateur and better than most professionals.”

While he is known for his power to “mythologize buildings” in his photographs, Shulman was more than just a man behind the lens in the realm of architectural photography. He influenced the careers of many budding architects in the 20th century, including John Lautner, a prominent student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Shulman was also an environmentalist, who was deeply concerned with the seamless blending of modernity and natural life. What made modernism so innovative was that it combined a sense of practicality with architectural beauty, but it never impinged upon the natural beauty of the environment. Fortunately, Shulman was able to witness the demise of the post-modernist era, a period that blasphemed the ideals that were upheld during the modernist period.

Visual Acoustics is a film for artists and art lovers alike. The film portrays Shulman as an endearing man of 93 years of age, as he revisits some of the homes that he photographed decades earlier. The audience cannot help but fall in love with this adorable old man with such a humbling passion for his work as a photographer and the architecture that captured his heart. Julius Shulman is cemented in history as the man who presented 20th century architecture to the world. Currently, his entire body of work is preserved in the archives of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Shulman left an unprecedented legacy of architectural photography to the world.