Los Angeles has never been a city that reveals itself easily from the street. It sprawls, it hides behind hedges, it climbs into canyons where nothing is visible from below. For most of the twentieth century, the way Americans came to picture the place was not by visiting it. It was through photographs of its houses.

That is an unusual thing to be able to say about a city. Paris has its boulevards, New York its skyline, but Los Angeles built its image out of interiors and terraces, out of glass walls and swimming pools shot at dusk. And it did so largely through the work of a small number of photographers who understood that a building is not a static object but something that changes character with the hour.

Shulman and the invention of a visual language

Julius Shulman, who was born in 1910 and worked well into his nineties, is the figure most responsible for this. He did not train as a photographer. He was handed a camera almost by accident, photographed a Richard Neutra house as a favour, and found that architects wanted more.

What he developed over the following decades was less a technique than a way of thinking about buildings. Shulman photographed houses as places where people lived rather than as sculptural objects. He introduced figures into the frame, a woman reading, a couple in conversation, a child by a pool, so that scale and inhabitation registered immediately. He waited for the light he wanted. He was willing to shoot at the moment when the interior lamps balanced against a fading sky, which required patience and a fairly precise understanding of when that balance would occur.

His 1960 photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, with two women seated in a glass corner suspended above the city grid, is probably the most widely reproduced architectural image ever made in the United States. It is worth noticing what it does. It sells nothing. It explains nothing technical. It simply makes the proposition of living in that house feel inevitable. The Getty Research Institute acquired his archive in 2005, which is a reasonable indicator of how the work is now understood: not as documentation of architecture, but as a body of work in its own right.

What the craft actually involves

The romance of that history obscures how difficult the work is. Los Angeles is a genuinely hard place to photograph buildings, and the reasons are physical rather than aesthetic.

The light is high and hard for most of the day, which flattens facades and drops the shaded elevation into darkness. The region’s defining domestic architecture is organised around views, which means rooms with an enormous bright aperture on one side and comparatively little light on the other. The human eye adapts across that range without effort. Film never could, and sensors still cannot in a single exposure. Every photographer working here has had to solve the same problem, whether with sheet film and careful lighting in Shulman’s era or with blended exposures now.

Then there is the terrain. A great deal of LA housing sits on a slope, often with no position from which a clean elevation is even possible. Coastal properties contend with a marine layer that can erase the view the entire building was designed around until the middle of the morning. Knowing the city’s weather and its hillsides is as much a part of the discipline as knowing optics.

None of this has changed. What has changed is who commissions the work and why.

The craft moved sideways, not away

Architectural photography as a fine art practice continues, but the far larger volume of it now happens commercially, in service of property listings. It is easy to be dismissive about that, and a lot of the output deserves dismissal. But the best of it draws directly on the same problems Shulman was solving, and occasionally arrives at the same answers.

The photographers doing serious architectural and real estate photography in Los Angeles today are still waiting for the dusk balance, still deciding whether a house faces east or west before they book the hour, still working out how to hold a canyon view and a dim hallway in one frame. The tools have multiplied, with drones and three-dimensional scanning and video walkthroughs added to the stills, but the underlying judgment has not simplified. If anything the demands have grown, because the images now have to carry the full weight of a decision made by someone who may never stand in the building.

There is a real continuity here that tends to get lost. The image of Los Angeles that circulates globally, the one that makes people want to live in a glass box on a ridge, was manufactured by photographers. It is still being manufactured by photographers, in enormous volume, most of it anonymous.

What gets preserved

Shulman’s archive survives because someone recognised it as a record of a moment in American design that the buildings themselves would not preserve. Many of the houses he photographed have been altered beyond recognition or demolished outright. The photographs are what remain.

That is worth holding onto when looking at the tens of thousands of property images produced across Los Angeles every year. Most will vanish when the listings expire. But collectively they constitute the most complete visual record of how this city actually lives that anyone is currently making, assembled entirely by accident, by people who were simply trying to sell a house on a difficult afternoon in the hills.