The Lens of Race: Whiteness and Architectural Photography at Case Study House #22

In the past few years, especially since the racial reckoning precipitated in the United States by the tragic murder of George Floyd in 2020, many who design the built environment and also those who study it have taken a new if belated interest in the ways race and space are deeply intertwined.¹ As a result, some environmental design degree programs have begun to offer new courses that focus on the racialized histories of urban, landscape, and architectural space, and have also made efforts to increase the diversity and inclusiveness of their faculties and curricula. Much work remains to be done, but these efforts mark a much-needed start to what must ultimately become a seismic-scale shift in the culture of design instruction if we have any hope of generating a more just and equitable future in the professions and in the public realm.²

Populating histories with works by designers who have been excluded until now because of race, ethnicity, gender, or nonconforming identity is an important step forward. And yet, until we begin to restructure the entire enterprise of architectural education and practice by applying different frameworks and interrogating the everyday substance on which our assumptions are based, we will simply be adding new names to the existing and deeply embedded structures of practice that are based on colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.³

In this article, I will demonstrate the need to reexamine one of the most frequently used artifacts on which the curriculum and practice of design education and architectural history are predicated: the architectural photograph. By selecting a famous photograph of a midcentury modern house as the subject for analysis, I aim to shift the approach to such photographs toward treating them as the complex cultural artifacts they are rather than simply as evidence of buildings at given moments in time. Making this shift is a necessary step toward undoing the ossified frameworks that have for centuries permitted architecture to be a white, male-dominated, and too frequently colonialist profession.

As a genre, architectural photography has only relatively recently been the subject of theorization and critical scrutiny, despite decades of art historical and visual culture analysis demonstrating the ideological roles played by images, especially those that are readily replicable, such as prints and photographs.⁴ Much of the most recent scholarship on architectural photography has broadened the scope of inquiry, focusing importantly on biographies and works of specific photographers and on the relationship of making and circulating photographs to various aspects of the architectural profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet questions about race in particular—and the intersectional theorization and analysis required for examination of architectural photography’s complicity in some of the most obvious spatial implications of racism, such as segregation, exclusion, and erasure—remain to be asked, even though these are the very questions that make studying architectural photography an especially distinctive and useful pursuit. Moreover, the temporality of photography, its ability to capture a moment in time, makes each image necessarily intertwined with the specific cultural field of its historical moment, one that includes architects, clients, building trades, construction industries, advertisers, publishers, editors, and sometimes the elite worlds of galleries and museums, among others. All of these become part of an entangled ecosystem that contributes to the racialized dynamics of architectural photography. Thus, three axioms underpin the analysis that follows: the overwhelming whiteness of architectural practice in the United States; the overwhelming whiteness of professional architectural photographers and their professional networks; and the wide circulation of knowledge forms that have upheld the white supremacy and racism that have underpinned the profession for centuries.⁵ In this article, I will thus follow Shawn Michelle Smith’s model, “that sees race as fundamental to and defined by visual culture, that understands race and visual culture to be mutually constitutive, and that reads photographic archives as racialized sites invested in laying claim to contested cultural meanings.”⁶

Art historians and scholars of visual culture and communication whose work focuses on race and photography have so far done more than architectural historians to demonstrate the ways in which the camera, film technologies, and white photographers have participated (knowingly and sometimes not) in a nexus of cultural production that has reinforced white supremacy.⁷ Their work has shown, for example, that the emulsion of photographic film was originally calibrated to maximize the representation of white skin tones; photo finishing labs and some photographers used images of white women, known as “Shirley cards,” as their standards of perfection for skin tones in their photographs. The major film-producing companies, such as Fuji and Kodak, presumed a predominantly white audience for their products, and that presumption, embedded in the film itself, was thus also fixed into every image made with that film, whether or not the photograph included human subjects. Notably, it was the skin of white women that became the standard of image quality.⁸ As I will show in this article, analysis that uses intersectional theory—in which race, class, and gender are examined as intertwined modalities—is necessary for a deeper understanding of the gendered and racialized aspects of architectural photographs.⁹

One aspect of the persuasive power of images resides in their ability to convince the viewer that they represent some form of truth. The presumed veracity of an image may have little to do with the apparent subject matter or with the surface qualities of the image. Photographs have the added power of appearing to document objectively what the lens captures on film. As Mary Woods has demonstrated, architects and architectural historians tend to consider photographs of buildings as equivalent to reality, treating the subjects and the pictures as the same things. Historians, after all, rely to a great extent on architectural photographs to study and to teach buildings, landscapes, and cities of the past and present.¹⁰ Architectural historians and design instructors have been so intently focused on the histories of the buildings depicted in the photographs that the photographs themselves disappear from the field of inquiry. In essence, as Woods notes, the photograph becomes the building.¹¹ Perhaps because architectural photographs often do not include human subjects, they appear to be devoid of social and/or political content, eliciting the question: How can a photograph of a building exterior or interior be understood as commentary on race or gender if all that is visible is the building or its constituent parts? When there are no human occupants in images of high-style architecture, historians have used the photographs as objective documentation of their subjects, focusing their analyses on the buildings rather than on social or political histories of architecture. Yet the countless architectural photographs that do not include humans can also tell us a great deal about race, class, gender, belonging, and exclusion. Erasure, after all, can speak as loudly as inclusion. The rare inclusion of human subjects in some architectural photographs, such as the one that is this article’s subject, makes such images especially tantalizing and compelling for historians who might wish to turn a critical eye on what is arguably the most common and ubiquitous form of architectural representation.

By way of example, this essay presents an in-depth analysis of one of the best-known architectural photographs of the twentieth century: Julius Shulman’s 1960 photograph of Case Study House #22, also known as the Stahl Residence, designed by the architect Pierre Koenig (Figure 1). I selected this photograph for two primary reasons. First, it has been frequently used by historians to teach aspects of twentieth-century architectural history and by and for designers as a reference image of California modernism. As an image widely recognizable by members of the general public as well, it has a particular resonance as a stand-in for what many understand architectural practice to encompass. It is thus precisely the sort of visual artifact that requires greater scrutiny. Second, the photograph includes human subjects, and the presence of two white women in the image has played an important role in the way it has been interpreted.

My point is not to “call out” Shulman for being racist, or to suggest that he made this or any other images with racist ideas consciously in mind. However, I write from a firm belief that the pervasive nature of racism in the United States makes it nearly impossible for whites especially—but also nonwhites—to be untouched by racism’s power to own portions of every mind and soul, and that the struggle to overcome its possession is a lifelong effort for people of conscience and moral integrity. My aim, then, is to demonstrate the ways in which every image, every artifact of architectural history may be scrutinized for complicity in the formation of white supremacy, and to argue that we must undertake such analysis because the structures that have permitted the harms and violence of racism are everywhere. Moreover, they are so deeply embedded, they are frequently unseen by those who use them.

Julius Shulman’s photographs have not received the scrutiny of scholars who are interested in race and visual culture; they have been subjected to little truly critical attention beyond the adulation warranted by their aesthetic appeal and technical superiority. Somewhat surprisingly and with very few exceptions, Shulman’s images have been treated largely as documentary, each perceived to reflect a specific reality—one determined by the architect of the house and the photographer and then perpetuated by design critics and historians.¹² This may be due, at least to some extent, to Shulman’s focus on stylistically “modern” buildings.¹³ The aesthetic modernism of his images may be partially responsible for what Roberta McGrath called in 1987 “the dominant ideological ruse of twentieth-century art criticism, [in which] modernism has functioned not only to suppress any concern for the wider social matrix of which all cultural production is a part, but has also hidden issues of class, race, and gender.”¹⁴ Art criticism has begun to overcome this in recent years, but architectural history and criticism have not substantially done so, at least when it comes to Shulman’s photographs. The formalist aesthetics of modernism and the tenets of modernist architecture have for decades negated the presence of the kind of cultural content I am addressing here, even and perhaps especially ideological content. Perhaps this is because, as the poet Paisley Rekdal has written, photographs can make things “seem not only inevitable, but impossible to protest . . . to be moved by their beauty replaces having to be moved politically on their [subject’s] behalf.”¹⁵

The livelihoods of architectural photographers like Shulman depended on the maintenance of sustained working relationships with practicing architects, advertising firms, and editors of magazines and newspapers who purchased and published the photographers’ work. Shulman had long-term and close working relationships with many of the twentieth-century’s best-known architects—he lived in a house designed by Raphael Soriano and had friendships with many of the architects who participated in the Case Study House program and whose buildings he was regularly hired to photograph. As noted below, his relationship with magazine editor John Entenza was not always an easy one, but it was nevertheless important for Shulman’s success in the midcentury years. This nexus of entwined relationships among photographer, architect, and publisher—all white men who relied on one another for degrees of professional success—played a significant role in continuously reinscribing the racial dynamics of the profession and those captured in architectural photography.¹⁶ An all-white world of professional transactions thus reproduced its own status within a racially closed system, whether carried out in an office or on the golf course, at the construction site or at a cocktail party.

Shulman and the architectural photographs he produced were part of this racially homogeneous world. Born in 1910, Shulman became the best-known American architectural photographer of the twentieth century in a career that spanned the years from roughly 1936 to his death in 2009. Authors writing about Shulman’s iconic photograph of Case Study House #22 have been overwhelmingly uniform in their analysis, finding both the image and the house to be encapsulations of the ideals of postwar optimism, virtuoso design, and what the architect Norman Foster deemed a “heroic” view, which, he said, “seems so memorably to capture the whole spirit of late twentieth-century architecture.”¹⁷ The photograph is frequently cast as depicting an idyllic midcentury Southern California lifestyle and as advocating for the appropriateness of midcentury modernist architecture for residential applications.¹⁸ Shulman described the photograph in the same buoyant terms, noting also that it served a clear instrumental purpose, since it was intended, in part, to help “allay the public’s fear of the structural capabilities of modern architecture” and thereby promote the work of a specific group of architects and their products.¹⁹ Shulman and his peers such as Ezra Stoller, Maynard Parker, and the Chicago firm of Hedrich Blessing made these images to sell buildings to clients, architects to potential future clients, and architectural modernism to the general public, which still remained skeptical in 1960 about the abilities of modernist forms to suit residential comfort, not to mention the mandates of suburban residential conformity.

The Case Study House (CSH) program, sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine from 1945 to 1966, might itself be cast in similar terms. Initiated by the magazine’s editor, John Entenza, the program resulted in the design of experimental modernist houses by some of the most prominent architects of the region in the postwar era—most, but not all, were constructed. The most famous of the houses is arguably that designed by Charles and Ray Eames for themselves in 1949, a house that embodied the goals of the program since it was constructed largely from off-the-shelf materials, thereby supporting the idea that modern architecture and industrial materials and technologies could be made available to and affordable for a mass public in the form of residential architecture. Once constructed, all the houses were open to the public for tours, at least briefly, and all were publicized in Arts & Architecture; images of the houses also appeared in shelter magazines, the popular press, and local newspapers.²⁰

The CSH program aimed to bring the virtues of architectural modernism, with its promise of clean, well-ordered, healthy, and prosperous lifestyles, to the masses, who were at the time imagined by the architectural, building, and lending communities as largely white, middle-class, and settled in or moving to suburbia or urban peripheries. A range of factors reinforced this imaginary, including the Federal Housing Administration’s postwar practice of insuring mortgage loans primarily for white Americans.²¹ The very name of the project—Case Study Houses—itself evoked notions about the purity and imagined objectivity of scientific research, which in turn conjured visions of a high-tech future governed by pure knowledge.²² Shulman photographed fifteen of the houses in the program, which held particular significance for him because he believed in the ideals it embodied. Decades after the program concluded, he described those ideals in a diary and detailed his conflicts with its patron, Entenza, over the project and its aims. Shulman regarded the CSH program as having the potential for significant societal impact. Noting that it could provide “a hoped-for boost to living standards of low-income families,” he continued:

Shulman was particularly displeased that architect Gregory Ain, whose left-leaning, progressive politics made him a target for FBI surveillance and McCarthy-era questioning, had been excluded from the CSH program, writing in his diary that “there was a likelihood that Ain’s progressive political expressions may have frightened Entenza.”²⁴ Shulman was drawn to documenting houses in a project he believed was undergirded by a progressive agenda even if its patron’s objectives were more distinctly aligned with commercial goals.²⁵ This is an important point because, as noted earlier, my analysis of the racial aspects of Shulman’s image of Case Study House #22 has little do with the photographer’s personally held political beliefs (which appear to have been left-leaning). Instead, what matters are the ways images circulate, whatever the intentions of their makers, and how they become part of broader cultural fields that live beyond the intentions of those who produce them.

Shulman’s photograph, made on 9 May 1960 with a Swiss-made Sinar camera, depicts the house Pierre Koenig designed for Carlotta and Buck Stahl and that became part of the Case Study series.²⁶ Although a suite of images that Shulman produced of the house appeared in Arts & Architecture in June 1960, the iconic image with the two women was first published in Pictorial Living in August 1960 and appeared again on the front page of the New York Times on Christmas Day of the same year. It is an image that has been reproduced countless times in architectural and design journals, in publications related to the photographer and his career, and more recently on dozens of websites that have culled the image for their own purposes.²⁷ As an image that circulates in the realms of popular culture as well as in architectural history and design, it has been viewed by vast audiences since its creation. According to Pierre Koenig’s own count, by 2001, the image had appeared in at least 1,200 books. In his diary, Shulman wrote that it was “undoubtedly the most widely published architectural photograph ever taken.”²⁸ That it appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in other mass-circulation publications indicates that its reception extended well beyond the sphere of midcentury modern architects and aficionados of their works. It was published in popular magazines and appeared as a framed image in galleries and museums, crossing over from architectural media into the wider world of mass consumption.²⁹ Its wide circulation has made this photograph a particularly powerful one that now reaches global audiences. Its complex, layered iconography, interweaving whiteness, gender, property, privilege, and modernism, is now known internationally. As such, the photograph itself has become a desired commodity just as it has also enhanced the commodification of that which it represents, reinforcing both the symbolic value and the cash value of all the photograph depicts, linking whiteness and property, gender norms and domesticity. The photograph is thus yet another instrument of capitalism’s connections to the elevation of whiteness.³⁰

An arrestingly beautiful image that embodies the hallmarks of Shulman’s artistic prowess in its elegant and dynamic composition, dramatic and skillful manipulation of light, and artful staging, the photograph conveys assumptions about the control of both urban and residential space. It emphasizes the occupants’ visual command of the city and their affluence, through the custom-designed home’s glass walls, indoor–outdoor connections, and carefully appointed interior space.

The photograph also implies the economic and social power, and by extension the presumed political power, of the occupants, symbolically represented by two well-dressed women seated in the living room who are not the actual occupants of the house (as will be discussed). Shulman warned that great care must be taken in the use of human models in architectural photography, because they can easily distract the eye from the architectural design. Yet he included them in some of his photographs, and women in particular could serve to make a house appear to be a domesticated, livable space—something Shulman had to help prove in this strikingly and unfamiliarly modernist home that Entenza and others wished to make visibly comfortable and accessible (at least to their ideal group of occupants).³¹

In this image, the women play such an important role that the photograph is sometimes referred to in Shulman’s papers as “Iconic Girls” and as “The Two Girls” photo. Although some presumed the women were professional models, they were actually students at the University of Southern California, Ann Lightbody (seated on the left) and Cynthia Murfee (later Cynthia Tindle, seated on the right). They were the girlfriends of two of Koenig’s students, and they wore dresses from their own closets rather than the designer clothing about which some authors have speculated.³² As Shulman noted in a 1994 interview:

Shulman also produced photographs with the women in switched positions (each in the chair the other had previously occupied), and with them looking out at the view instead of at each other. He made a nearly identical photo taken from the same vantage point but without the chairs, and without the women (Figures 2 and 3).³⁴ Strikingly, the latter image is both literally and metaphorically lifeless, and the versions with the women looking at the city instead of at each other are surprisingly less animated.

Because architectural photographers so seldom include people, the women in this photograph, no matter how spontaneously included by Shulman, take on a particular importance as a critical aspect of the composition. That the photographed women were actually impromptu visitors rather than owners/occupants or family guests mattered little, because they were understood by Entenza and viewers to be lexical figures that by 1960 were part of the well-known visual language of homemaking and home marketing.³⁵ The versions without the women might have prompted consideration of alternate occupants. How might the image have been read if the women were not white? If the occupants were Black men? No legal structures were in place prior to the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 that would have made architect, photographer, or editor imagine their inclusion to be likely. Instead, the white women reinforced the known presumption that such houses were imagined and intended for whites alone—as Susan Kandel notes, the women “authenticate a total lifestyle”—and the convivial atmosphere created by the chatting women literally domesticated a space that might otherwise have seemed to lack known cues of residential comfort.³⁶

Shulman also created another nighttime image of the interior taken from the same vantage point but with a man leaning against the frame of the sliding glass door and looking out at the city (Figure 4). Tellingly, he labeled two of the transparency sleeves and the color negative for this image “Play Boy.”³⁷ The “girls” were intended to conjure domestic security and conviviality, while the “Play Boy” with his back to the camera, standing at the edge of the house, a patio in front of him that lacked a protective railing at the top of a steep slope, conjured other lifestyles entirely, and likely not those that Entenza most hoped to convey. With one hand on the door’s frame and another tucked into a pants pocket, the man gazes at the network of lights spread out far below him, surveilling its possibilities, a black chasm of unknown vertiginous space looming between him and the urban grid to which he is visually connected although it is physically distant. This is arguably the more spectacular of the two photos, since the man’s position in the room emphasizes the steep drop below the house, potentially producing a sense of vertigo. Turned toward the view and away from the living room, the solitary man is disengaged from the viewer, conjuring both a Hollywood version of masculinity and a social isolation depicted in film noir versions of Los Angeles, in contrast to the warm sociability portrayed by the women, who engage each other and, by extension, the viewer. “Play Boy” is not an image that soothes or convinces an audience of architectural modernism’s inherent domesticity; instead, it evokes modernism’s edgier qualities and perhaps its risks. It is thus unsurprising that the Shulman photograph that includes the women became the iconic image associated with the house.

Considering that Shulman was hired to make photographs that would showcase the house, it is notable that this most famous “Two Girls” image displays relatively little of the residence. What the photograph does not reveal is that the house is actually relatively small, just 2,300 square feet—bigger than the Fritz Burns or Kaiser tract houses that by then populated the land on Los Angeles’s peripheries, but smaller than many of the expansive houses one could encounter in upscale Los Angeles neighborhoods—with two bedrooms, a compact kitchen, and a dining area in addition to the spacious living room, all arranged in an L-shaped plan (Figure 5). Made primarily of steel, which was one of its innovative qualities, the house was constructed at a time when land in the Los Angeles hills was still relatively inexpensive: the Stahls purchased the lot for $13,500 and took out a construction loan of $34,000.³⁸

Of the house, the photograph reveals only the corner of the living room interior, the structural frame that holds the floor-to-ceiling glass walls and sliding glass doors, the eaves of the roof that project beyond the walls, and an enticing fragment of the substructure that supports the house. An unoccupied chaise longue and two potted plants occupy the terrace in the foreground, the angle and striations of the chaise mirroring the lines of the beams that support the roof, which projects out over the city below and occupies the upper third of the image. The heaviness of the upper third of the photograph sits in stark contrast to and directs the eye toward the glowing lights of the living room and Los Angeles’s grid of twinkling lights below the house, whose structure seems to hover over the edge of a cliff, with the nearest neighbor at the time of construction positioned 120 feet down the hill.³⁹ Without supporting images (plan or elevation drawings and additional house photographs), it is impossible to fully understand the form of the house itself. Shulman did create a suite of photographs of the house, some using color film, that do a far better job of describing the structure’s spaces and contours (Figures 6 and 7).⁴⁰ Nonetheless, the “Two Girls” photo remains its iconic representation. Surely the image’s arresting beauty at least partially explains its elevated status. Yet its aesthetic qualities are so tightly interwoven with an iconography of whiteness, class status, and gender norms that these, too, must be considered as important aspects of the photograph’s reception.

Carefully examined, this photograph does much more than present a straightforward image of a postwar house. It also serves as a pictorial prompt for a set of associations that viewers assemble in their imaginations. The image functions as a synecdoche—a part that is used to refer not only to the whole of the house itself but also to an identity that was aspirational for many at the time because of what it could materially bestow on those who possessed it, an identity that was signaled by white, stylishly dressed occupants whose upper-middle-class status could be imagined or inferred from their presumed ownership of the property and house. Indeed, the owners of this house could not be presumed otherwise in 1960, given FHA redlining, unfair lending practices, real estate steering, and neighborhood restrictions still commonly practiced in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States, making it virtually impossible for this house and others like it to be occupied by people of color. Regardless of what notions of race, class, and gender either Koenig or Shulman held as individuals, the wide circulation and reproduction of this image requires that it be examined and understood as a site through which race—in this instance whiteness—is literally posed and white supremacy reinscribed.⁴¹

Beyond depicting Case Study House #22, the photograph positions the house as both a frame and a lens. It simultaneously frames and filters a specifically racialized view of twentieth-century residential architecture and the city over which the house hovers, a city that viewers may see as the embodiment of economic potential, personal freedoms, and sparkling Southern California glamour, when in fact it also embodies contrasting settings of segregation and strife. The photograph presents an optimal balance between reality and a believable fiction, one that pertains not just to the architecture itself but also to the vague details of the lives of those depicted in the photograph, and of the city stretched out below them. And it is, after all, the city and its lights that are equally the subject of this photograph. Pierre Koenig wrote that he designed the home “so that Los Angeles becomes an extension of the house and vice-versa. The house is just a part of the city.”⁴² But is it really?

The commanding view of the city below the house permits a visual superiority through control from above, just as it also makes possible a view that appears whole and unified even as some elements are selectively excluded or rendered invisible by the distant composition. The house affords the occupants and anyone who enters that space the visual authority associated with the control of space itself, which is also a privilege long associated with white identities. In elevated vantage points like the one depicted in the Shulman photograph, there is nothing to constrain the viewer’s eye, no boundary other than the image frame—it controls all that it sees. The ability to control space, symbolically or otherwise, and the liberty of the unconstrained eye and body were freedoms reserved for whites in the postwar United States.⁴³ This was the world into which viewers projected themselves and to which the architecture and building industries hoped they would aspire. It is a realm associated with the authority and social dominance that come with privilege and the economic and political security with which such privilege is associated.⁴⁴ Knowingly or not, Shulman created an image that contributed to the enormous corpus of postwar house imagery whose iconography of white privilege was everywhere, generating a powerful cultural field that linked representations of houses to specifically defined notions of race and class. Despite their assignment to a genre of visual production (the architectural photograph) that has seldom admitted its culpability or responsibility for taking part in any political or social project, images like Shulman’s worked to validate the social order connected with the architecture they depicted, making it seem more authentic through the legitimation and reinforcement of expectations about race, class, family life and composition, and heteronormativity. They were part of the everyday practices of architectural photography, practices that pretended documentary innocence while performing important ideological work in a U.S. economy both built and predicated upon a housing market intended for the social, economic, and political mobility of whites.⁴⁵

Recognizing the whiteness of the image is essential to understanding its rhetorical influence and durability. Whiteness was already the accepted standard of purity and perfection in exclusive housing developments across the country in the postwar period. Among the most vivid examples is Levittown, Pennsylvania, the second of the eponymous suburbs designed and constructed by Levitt & Sons between 1951 and 1958. The Levitts envisioned and promoted their second suburb as nothing less than planned perfection, a middle- and working-class utopia that they and many of their customers believed to be rendered even more flawless by its exclusionary housing policy. Until 1957, when the first Black family moved in, an event that sparked a race riot lasting several weeks and harassment toward the family lasting several months, the Levitts held to a strict policy of selling to whites only, screening all buyers at the point of sale, the so-called House of Levittown.⁴⁶ Many neighborhoods and developments in Los Angeles and its surrounding areas were likewise restricted to whites alone. Los Angeles of 1960 was a city—like many others at the time—of segregation, urban tensions, urban renewal, and turbulent social change. As Laura Redford has written, by 1939, “nearly half—47 percent—of all Los Angeles County residential neighborhoods had restrictive covenants that forbade certain racial groups from those communities,” and these were amplified by the real estate industry and its practices, such that the entire area west of downtown Los Angeles became zoned as white and middle- or upper-middle-class.⁴⁷ The Stahl Residence existed in a neighborhood that remained white through the same combination of factors that shaped segregation elsewhere: redlining, real estate steering, so-called gentlemen’s agreements, and discriminatory lending practices. These were compounded by the limited opportunities for earning high wages and for inheriting wealth that affected many people of color then as now. Whiteness and the postwar residential housing market were so deeply intertwined in the minds of postwar consumers that the whiteness of an image like Shulman’s could go entirely unnoticed and unquestioned, both at the time of its production and for many subsequent decades.

The fact that the women in the photograph hover above the city, separated from it, is key. The symbolic elevation and the real separation of white women that set them apart from both men and people of color has deep historical roots. The imagined purity of white women is a cornerstone of both white supremacy and the patriarchy that underpins it. The composition of this photograph confirms long-held beliefs about race and gender and links the figures of the elevated white women to equally deep understandings about whiteness and property.⁴⁸ The photograph depicts the isolation of these women in a well-ordered domestic interior far from the less orderly city below, an urban environment that was already characterized in 1960 by uncontrolled and largely unregulated growth. Yet the segregated city above which the two women perch was one in which racial and ethnic divisions became increasingly spatialized—literally concretized—through the planning and construction of massive freeways that divided the city and reinforced existing lines of segregation, where South Los Angeles (and the view in Shulman’s photograph looks to the south) became increasingly the location of poverty and race-related violence.⁴⁹ Providing additional context for life beyond the photograph on the day of its creation, Mary Melton reflected in 2001: “Who wouldn’t have wanted to join that party in space that balmy evening of May 9, 1960? It had been a sunny day, with moderate smog and a high of 83. Down below people fretted over the 17-week Writers Guild strike and American spy planes patrolling Soviet skies to guard the free world against ‘the threats of mass destruction,’ as the Los Angeles Times put it.”⁵⁰

For twenty-first-century viewers, Shulman’s image simultaneously conjures associations with the Los Angeles we know through a set of varied lenses that are less contained than the one attached to Shulman’s camera. Los Angeles’s complexity is as vast and deep as its geographic reach is broad, but for context we can recall that just five years after Shulman made his photo, the Watts riots erupted from a deep well of anger and frustration, already simmering in 1960, on the part of Blacks who had experienced decades of discrimination in the Los Angeles basin. And the period from 1958 to 1961 bracketed the struggles over land at Chavez Ravine that resulted in the displacement and erasure of a vital community of Latinx residents in favor of the construction of Dodger Stadium—a contest over urban space that has become well known among scholars who study spatial (in)justice.⁵¹ From 1950 to 1960 the percentage of Latinx residents in East Los Angeles nearly doubled, and “during the 1950s, Watts and South Central Los Angeles . . . coalesced to form a broader area that became synonymous with the black ghetto.”⁵² By 1960, Los Angeles had become the third-largest urban area in the United States, a city renowned for its haves and have-nots, its fragile ecology marked by fires and earthquakes, all of which were seemingly defied by Case Study House #22 as it projected from its equally fragile Hollywood Hills site. Shulman was aware of these massive urban renewal projects—in fact, he was photographing some of them, including the renewal efforts at Bunker Hill.

The photograph of Case Study House #22, like so many others, including those used in advertisements featuring white families in domestic settings, assuaged possible anxieties during a time when the association of whiteness with the right to accumulate real property was at a long-sustained apex, while the surrounding political landscape was beginning to shift in ways that could be seen and felt. These photographs worked, as many snapshots of families also work, as a mechanism to preserve and reinforce specific ideals—in this case, about white identity and its unearned privileges, about the fixing of white women as the consumers and producers of convivial domestic leisure and the promise of heterosexual normativity in domestic space, and about the right to purchase homes in segregated areas as a defense against an uncertain future.⁵³ As Susan Sontag notes, photography is “mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”⁵⁴ Photographs like Shulman’s might then also be seen as a visual defense against the challenges to power, hierarchy, and the status quo that an incipient civil rights movement must surely have signaled.⁵⁵ After all, the image of any postwar house could stand symbolically for so much: democracy, free market economics, neoliberal politics, Cold War triumphs, racial orders, and more. Housing was and is a material reality, but it is also a highly representable social order through which ideas about American social life could—then as now—be transmitted extremely convincingly. Images of houses were thus key components in a postwar communications strategy about what it meant to be American. Instead of photographic images portraying the racial discord or unrest that characterized significant portions of the United States in the 1950s, the Shulman photograph offered security through the affirmation of what was by 1960 a destabilized social order.

The expansive and twinkling grid of lights in the photograph is beautiful, but it is also important for what the lights obscure: the arid boulevards of South Los Angeles, with their commerce, their traffic, their dirt, their tangle of utility wires, their anonymity, and their diverse occupants. The view similarly obscures the growth of activism in those same streets, a burgeoning realm of political unrest that pushed many white Angelenos to further retreat to suburbs and more exclusive zones like those in which the Stahl Residence was situated.⁵⁶ It is interesting to note that despite Shulman’s efforts to eliminate glare from the flash on the house’s glass walls, the limited glare that resulted does in fact erase part of the city from view. On a clear day, viewers might have glimpsed—or wondered why they could not—the myriad freeways whose construction began in earnest in the 1950s; these enormous concrete superstructures were intended, in part, to facilitate the movement of white residents away from Black, Latinx, and Asian residents and into areas like the neighborhood where Koenig built Case Study House #22.⁵⁷ Far from the boulevards of Paris, so often evoked as symbols of urban modernity, Los Angeles has never embraced (nor has its urban design encouraged) a Baudelairean street life, and in 1960 the grid of lights conjured not the ability to occupy or stroll through the spaces they implied but instead the ability to move through them with speed and efficiency. The lights delineate the automobile-centric terrain that characterizes the sprawling Southern California landscape, one that was already in 1960 producing unhealthy air quality and congested progress for Angelenos during their daily commutes.

The automobility for which the grid of streets was designed remained in 1960 a largely white mobility, with Black and other nonwhite groups the majority users of public transportation modes in Los Angeles. Truly, a daytime scene captured by Shulman from this vantage point does not reveal any details of these elements (Figure 8). But the sunlit city is undeniably less glamorous. In daylight, we might catch glimpses of a different Los Angeles, one that was not quite as idyllic as the nighttime photograph suggests. Moreover, the lights themselves tell a specific story about an orderly metropolis with a grid that implies, as grids do, the promise of geometrically achieved democracy, equality, and freedom. The grid of lights also suggests the possible existence of a public realm that might rest below the private realm of the house, situated as its visual and social counterpart, but a public realm that had all but disappeared in 1960 Los Angeles. The darkened streets leave open the possibility for viewers that such a public realm or other imagined realms exist, because the streets themselves cannot be seen. The twinkling grid becomes a ruled slate onto which viewers project their dreams and urban imaginings of the city below.

How, then, does looking at an image like Shulman’s help us understand something about race and its entanglements with architecture, urbanism, and visual culture? It is not news, for example, that Los Angeles is a city with a complicated history that includes segregation, race-related violence, housing discrimination, and economic disparities. The photograph helps us understand something new about the ways whiteness works in and through the built environment and its representations, even and perhaps especially through images that seem benign and on which designers have frequently drawn for inspiration. In analyzing such images, we can begin to understand how ideas about space, exclusion, and white supremacy become formulated, shaped, and cemented, how they become part of specific spatial imaginaries. Such analysis might be especially useful for helping us to see how race ideas circulate in images and their archives, and also how they move through syllabi, curricula, and professions.

Images like Shulman’s famous photograph are part of the enormous corpus of visual material we encounter every day that provides subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle messages about who belongs in some parts of the city and who does not; who controls architectural and urban space and who does not; who has access to affluence and who does not; who has a fair crack at life chances (as George Lipsitz calls them) and who does not.⁵⁸ In midcentury U.S. culture, such images both instructed and reflected ideas about the constitution of white, middle-class identities and the purchase those had. The image of Los Angeles that emerges from Shulman’s photograph, then, is part of a larger cultural and iconographic field, one whose repeated reproduction helped establish a particular way of seeing residential modernism and its relationship to the city, one that helped to justify housing segregation just as it also cemented the racial fault lines that persist today in Los Angeles and so many other cities. Ultimately, Shulman’s photograph should compel us to interrogate architectural photography’s complex and multiple modes of operation. Tanya Sheehan has recently demonstrated in her study of the social politics of the photographic smile that the visualization of happiness depends on the subjugation of others—that “the attachment of good feelings to certain bodies necessarily depends on its denial to others” because “histories of happiness must therefore also attend to constructions of unhappiness.”⁵⁹ Similarly, the photographic representation of the architectural “good life” of domesticity must also be examined in relation to its opposite—including photographs of people engaged in struggles against oppression, segregation, and sociospatial injustice.

My point here is not that we can no longer enjoy the pleasures afforded by this beautiful image, nor that we should ignore Shulman’s artistic and technical accomplishments, Koenig’s architectural prowess, or the marvels of the Case Study House program. Instead, this analysis—this close reading of a widely circulated and reproduced photograph—pushes us to read past the surface of such images. We should regard them as potent resources for the production of deep social and cultural histories of architecture and the city, with the potential to draw architectural and urban history into a broader set of intellectual realms. They can help us understand more granular dimensions of this country’s deep and persistent resistance to the fights against segregation and discrimination in housing, as well as the ways environmental design education and the built environment professions have refused to see the evidence in front of them in their everyday practices. If we fail to recognize the architectural photograph as a form of representation that mediates our understanding of the built environment—one that is shaped by the social, political, and economic contexts in which it is produced—we miss opportunities to understand the power of such images to influence our understanding of those forces, and the ways architecture and its practitioners are complicit in their creation.