SEEING THROUGH TIME

One local institution was shooting another.

Ninety-six-year-old Julius Shulman, whose photographs made midcentury modern architecture iconic, glamorous and suggestive, spent six Tuesdays in May and June focusing his lens on the Getty Villa, a reproduction of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, the Roman country house buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.

Several times before, in 1974 when it first opened and through the 1980s, Shulman was commissioned to document the villa, which sits on a 64-acre estate in the hills of Pacific Palisades and houses the Getty Museum’s extensive antiquities collection. In those early images, Shulman explored the almost slavish formality of the pedimented structure. In this round, he produced color and black-and-white photographs showing the free hand of its recent renovation and the reinterpretation of the ancient world in a large complement of new buildings.

On a fine spring day, when the sunlight seemed to bounce off a soft blue sky, heightening the exquisite details of architects Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti’s ideas, Shulman produced seven exposures. This might seem scant, but consider that he was working with film, not digitally, which meant that each image had to be carefully composed according to the movement of the sun and lighted where shadows inconveniently fell. And Shulman does not crop his images during the printing process to change the compositions. What he and his collaborator, Juergen Nogai, saw upside-down and backward in the ground glass of the 4-by-5 format Sinar camera was what would be printed.

“One setup, one shot, one negative. . . . If you can’t bracket it in one exposure, you’re wasting your time and materials,” Shulman said.