Why he matters
Most people meet Taliesin West through photographs before they ever drive up Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, and many of the best-known ones were made by a young man from Mesa. Pedro E. Guerrero had dropped out of art school when Wright hired him in 1939 to record the camp rising on the mesa below the McDowells. He had never seen anything like it, so he photographed it the way it looked to him, as sculpture, and Wright liked the results enough to keep him for twenty years.
He is also a rare Arizona-born figure in the Wright story. Guerrero grew up Mexican American in a farm town where he met casual bigotry, and a job with an eccentric genius became his way out and, eventually, the start of a seven-decade career.
Where to find his mark today
Taliesin West. The building he photographed from 1939 on, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and still open for tours.
Cattle Track Arts Compound. The canal-side artists’ colony whose roster of photographers includes Guerrero.
The desert camp through his lens
When Guerrero arrived, Frank Lloyd Wright had bought his land in December 1937 and his apprentices were still building with rock, concrete, redwood and canvas. That is the Taliesin West in Guerrero’s pictures: stretched canvas overhead, desert masonry and Fellowship members at work, which gave the architecture a human scale. The compound in north Scottsdale has changed since, with glass where canvas was, and his photographs are the record of what it was first.
The full story
Pedro E. Guerrero was born in 1917 in Casa Grande, the son of a sign painter who much later founded the Rosarita Mexican food company. The family soon moved to a one-room house in Mesa, and Guerrero spoke bitterly all his life about the prejudice he met there. In 1937 he got into the Art Center School in Los Angeles, and he did not stay to finish.
In 1939 Frank Lloyd Wright looked at the 22-year-old’s portfolio and hired him on the spot to photograph Taliesin West, then under construction on the desert north of Scottsdale. The 1930s camp was rough, and Guerrero shot it as sculpture. Wright was pleased and invited him into the Taliesin Fellowship, and Guerrero went on to photograph the original Taliesin in Wisconsin and other Wright projects. He was one of the few people who could joke with the architect, and his pictures show a relaxed Wright that almost nobody else caught.
In 1941 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served in Italy as a photo officer, running a lab that developed film shot on bombing runs. After the war, in the mid-1940s, he came back to Wright, and their relationship has been described as close to father and son. Whenever Wright could choose his photographer, he chose Guerrero, and Guerrero worked with him until a few days before Wright’s death in 1959.
His Wright portfolio opened doors in New York, where he photographed mid-century modern houses by Breuer, Saarinen and Philip Johnson for the major shelter magazines. From the early 1960s he spent years documenting Alexander Calder, and later Louise Nevelson. The Ellis family’s Cattle Track compound counts him among its photographers, beside Jay Dusard. He published Picturing Wright about the Wright years and A Photographer’s Journey in 2007, and PBS’s American Masters made a film about him. He died in 2012 in Florence, Arizona, at 95, back in the desert where his career began, a story that sits in the ranches-and-war era.