Book: “Julius Shulman Los Angeles”

“My father Julius Shulman grew up with Los Angeles,” writes Judy McKee in the forward to Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis. The photographer furthered midcentury Modernism all over the world with his camera (Richard Neutra’s 1936 Kun House, is shown), but “Los Angeles was his city,” McKee says. Sam Lubell and Douglas Woods present 239 pages of photos that document Shulman’s hometown in flux, of farmland and southern California landscapes before development, a predominantly white Compton, workers in factories, and housewives in grocery stores—all through the lens of postwar optimism.• $60; Rizzoli New York, April 2011