These are the days Chuck Grimes talks a lot about. With summer school in California cancelled this year as one response to the state's budget crisis, they seem well and truly gone:
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After graduating from Roosevelt High School -- where he took what would be his only course in photography -- Shulman spent seven years as what he called an "academic drifter," auditing geology, philosophy and other courses at UCLA and UC Berkeley. He returned to Los Angeles without a degree and still unsure what he wanted to do.
He was by then, however, earning rent money from pictures he took at Berkeley with an Eastman box camera. And one photograph of the 6th Street Bridge over the L.A. River had won first prize in a national magazine competition.
It was a chance meeting with Neutra in March 1936 -- two weeks after Shulman left Berkeley -- that would open up the possibility of becoming an architectural photographer. A man who was renting a room from Shulman's sister, and who was working as a draftsman for Neutra, invited Shulman along one day to see Neutra's Kun house, which was under construction near Fairfax Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
As was his habit by then, Shulman took along a vest-pocket camera that was equipped with a bellows that unfolded.
"I had never seen a modern house before," Shulman said. It "intrigued me with its strange forms -- beyond any previous identity of a house in my experience."
Shulman developed a few of the pictures and sent them to the draftsman, who showed them to Neutra. The architect, then in his mid-40s, sent for young Shulman and ordered up more prints.
With Neutra's invitation to photograph other projects, Shulman was suddenly a professional architecture photographer.
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