Pedro e guerrero biography death

Pedro E. Guerrero September 5, — September 13, was an American photographer known for his extraordinary access to Frank Lloyd Wright.

At age 75, Guerrero returned to Florence, Arizona, his homeland, a place he never expected to see again.

He was a sought-after architectural photographer in the s. In a career shift that was part serendipity and part the result of being blacklisted by the major shelter magazines for his stance against the Vietnam War , he later concentrated on documenting the work and lives of the American artists Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. Guerrero, a sign painter who much later would found Rosarita, one of the first commercial Mexican food companies in the United States.

All his life, Guerrero spoke bitterly of the casual bigotry he encountered growing up in Mesa, and he viewed his acceptance in to the Art Center School, then in Los Angeles, as deliverance. Guerrero's seven-decade career in photography began in when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright impulsively hired him to record the ongoing construction at his winter home, Taliesin West , in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Pedro E. Guerrero (September 5, – September 13, ) was an American photographer known for his extraordinary access to Frank Lloyd Wright.

Just 22 and an Art Center dropout, Guerrero had never seen anything like Wright's "desert camp," and he decided to treat it exactly as it appeared to him, as sculpture. The resulting photographs pleased the architect, and Wright soon invited him to join his Fellowship. 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 Wright, forged both in the drafting room and while waiting for the sun to fall just so on a redwood beam, made him an important interpreter of the architect's work.

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 freelance assignments for all the major shelter magazines.

He established an international reputation photographing the world as it built and rebuilt, developing a particular specialty in the mid-century modern houses of the s and s, including those of Eero Saarinen , Edward Durell Stone , Marcel Breuer , Landis Gores , Philip Johnson , John Black Lee and Joseph Salerno.