Pedro E. Guerrero
Pedro E. Guerrero (September 5, 1917 – September 13, 2012) was an American photographer. Known for his extraordinary access to Frank Lloyd Wright, he was one of the most sought-after architectural photographers of the “Mad Men” era. In a career shift that was part serendipity and part the result of being black-listed by the major shelter magazines for his stance against the Vietnam War, he later concentrated on documenting the work and lives of two important American artists, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson.
Guerrero was born in Casa Grande, Ariz., to Rosaura and Pedro W. Guerrero, a sign painter, who much later would found Rosarita[1], one of the first commercial Mexican food companies in the United States. The Guerrero family moved to a one-room house built on the footprint of a tent platform in Mesa, Ariz., soon after his birth. All his life, Guerrero spoke bitterly of the casual bigotry he encountered growing up in Mesa, and he viewed his acceptance in 1937 to the Art Center School, then in Los Angeles, as deliverance. He took up photography only because the painting classes were filled, but “The minute I made my first print," he said, "I thought, This is mine. This is for me. This is a magic that I can control.” His seven-decade career in photography began in 1939 when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright impulsively hired him to record the ongoing construction at his home, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Just 22 and an Art Center dropout, Guerrero had never seen anything like Wright's rock-hewn "desert camp," and he decided to treat it exactly as it appeared to him, as sculpture. The resulting photographs pleased the architect, and he was invited by Wright to join his Fellowship. Guerrero recorded the architect's Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis., and other Wright projects before enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1941. He was stationed in Italy, where he was a photo officer, running a laboratory that developed film taken from planes during bombing runs.
After his service in World War II, Guerrero rekindled his relationship with Wright, resuming an intimacy that has been described as that of a father and son. When it was possible for Wright to command his photographer of choice, it was always Guerrero. Guerrero's understanding of his work, and his extraordinary access made him an important interpreter of the architect's work. His Wright photographs are featured in dozens of books, including the definitive study of his work, “In the Nature of Materials,” by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Guerrero often included people in his photographs, especially members of the Taliesin Fellowship, which gave the architecture a human scale and also showed how people lived in the buildings. As one of the few able to joke with the architect, Guerrero shot some of the only photographs that show him in a relaxed mode.
Guerrero's Wright portfolio was a passport in postwar New York City to a freelance assignments for all the major shelter magazines. He established a reputation on a par with other noted photographers of the day, including Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller. With them, he documented the midcentury modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s, including those of Eero Saarinen, Edward Durell Stone, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Philip Johnson,John Black Lee and Joseph Salerno. Magazine assignments also took him to Julia Child's pot-lined kitchen in Cambridge, Mass., and to John Huston's castle in Ireland. He continued to document Wright and his work until a few days before the architect's death in 1959.
In 1963 a routine assignment for House and Garden magazine took him to the doorstep of sculptor Alexander Calder, the creator of the mobile. “Calder's studio was the most glorious mess I had ever seen,” Guerrero recalled. Over the next 13 years, he worked as closely with Calder as he had with Wright, documenting his home, studio and artwork in Roxbury, Conn., as well as his houses and studios in Sache, France. Any unhappiness he felt at being blacklisted for his outspoken objection to the Vietnam War while serving on a draft board [2]was compensated by the opportunity to shadow Calder, whose playful mobiles, stabiles, jewelry and homemade kitchen tools intrigued him every bit as much as Wright's masterpieces. In any event, he had, he said, grown weary of pristine interiors. From 1979 to 1984, Guerrero documented the severe and mysterious work of another sculptor he admired, Louise Nevelson, as well as her studio and home in Greenwich Village.
Guerrero, who lived for many years in New Canaan, Conn., died on Sept. 13, 2012, at his home in Florence, Ariz., at age 95.[3]
The documentary “Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey” (Paradigm Productions) will premiere in fall 2015 as a co-presentation of Latino Public Broadcasting's VOCES and WNET American Masters. The photographer was also the subject of the documentary "Pedro E. Guerrero: Portrait of an Image Maker" (Gnosis Ltd.), completed in 2007, and aired through 2012 on PBS.
Bibliography
- Guerrero, Pedro E. A Photographer's Journey with Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, and Louise Nevelson, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-56898-590-9
- Guerrero, Pedro E. Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998, ISBN 1-55670-655-3
- Guerrero, Pedro E. Picturing Wright: An Album from Frank Lloyd Wright's Photographer, Pomegranate Press, 1993, ISBN 1-56640-804-0
References
- ^ http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/25/obituaries/pedro-w-guerrero-93-headed-food-concern.html
- ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9401E7D81031E034BC4953DFB4668383679EDE "New Canaan Split on Naming of Dove to Its Draft Board," The New York Times, Februray 1, 1968
- ^ "Pedro Guerrero, Who Captured Art in Photos, Dies at 95," The New York Times, September 14, 2012
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