In 1950, Raphael Soriano built Julius Shulman a studio and residence high in the Hollywood Hills. Decades later, the house had become a Los Angeles Cultural Landmark, and Shulman returned to photograph it with David Tseklenis. The result is the fifty-second title in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series: a small hardcover in which the photographer examines his own home, office, and surrounding gardens.
What distinguishes the project is its dual authorship. Shulman and Tseklenis are both credited as photographers, so the book records a collaboration rather than a single retrospective gaze. That distinction shapes how the architecture is seen. A house photographed by its own occupant, and by a second photographer working alongside him, sits differently than a commissioned architectural study. The camera is not a visitor here. It moves through rooms and gardens that belong to the man behind it.
The book’s ending sharpens that intimacy: it closes with a photograph Shulman made of the property in the 1940s, as it was being prepared for construction. The sequence thus spans anticipation and habitation, the site before the house and the house as lived space. Shulman’s reputation rests largely on his mid-century images of California modernism, made for architects and magazines. This book turns that practice inward, testing it against a building he knew from the inside.
For collectors, its interest lies in this convergence of subject, authorship, and form. At sixteen pages, with twenty-three four-color plates and one original print, it is a compact, carefully shaped object in which a canonical architectural photographer becomes his own client, and the landmark he documented is the one he lived in. The collaboration with Tseklenis, and the historical coda, give the volume a narrative arc unusual within the series.
Self-portraiture is rarely so architectural. Here the house is both subject and evidence, and the photographer is both author and resident. Nazraeli’s format suits that restraint: a modest hardcover, tightly sequenced, with the original print anchoring the edition. The book does not survey a career; it concentrates on a single property and the ways two photographers chose to see it. That focus, rather than any claim of rarity, is what recommends it to a collector attentive to how photobooks construct meaning through sequence, credit, and the closing image.
