2017

Shulmania

Shulmania is a series of overpainted photographs made by the famous photographer Julius Shulman, who has a prominent position in 20th century architectural photography. His photographs document American architecture primarily on the west coast of the USA. Architecture is always directly related to nature, even if this is only given by the sky stretching over an urban setting. However, architecture is also subject to the fundamental law of entropy formulated in the elementary second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics reveals information about the direction of processes and the principle of irreversibility. And from the second law of thermodynamics, the definition of thermodynamic temperature and the state variable entropy can be derived. All spontaneous processes are irreversible. There is always an increase in entropy. The restoration of the (often referred to as "ordered") initial state then requires the use of energy or information. The overpainting of Julius Shulman's photographs is an attempt to show, or at least to imagine, these irreversible, spontaneously occurring processes.