Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life
Pedro E. Guerrero is one of the most prolific architectural photographers of the 20th Century. Born in 1917 in Casa Grande, Arizona, his career began in 1939 when, at the age of 22, he visited Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West and was immediately hired as the architect’s principal photographer. Since then his photographs have been featured in nearly every major publication by and about Wright, including Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941. Guerrero’s close relationship with Wright inevitably shaped his perception of the built environment. He approached architecture as though it were sculpture, capturing the dynamic spatial qualities of the compositions. This sensitivity attracted magazine editors and, after moving to New York and then Connecticut in the 1940s, he established a career that paralleled that of Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller. In addition to commercial work for journals like House & Garden Magazine, Vogue, and Architectural Record, for which he documented buildings by modernists from Eero Saarinen to Joseph Salerno, he also photographed the work of “The Harvard Five,” a group that included John M. Johansen, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Philip Johnson and Eliot Noyes. Guerrero also established close relationships with artists Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson, and his photographs of their work reflect an important, yet often overlooked understanding of the blurred line between their sculpture and the homes in which they were created. While Guerrero’s work rightfully continues to be associated with Wright, this exhibition offers a unique overview of the diversity of Guerrero’s subjects, from seminal examples of modern architecture to portraits of the designers whose work helped define modern life in the United States.
Thursday, April 5, 2012 – April 25, 2012
WUHO
Opening and artist talk | Thursday, April 5, 2012.
Artist talk | 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) 6522 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90028 t: 323.957.1777
Exhibition opening | 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm following talk next door at WUHO, 6518 Hollywood Boulevard
WUHO | 6518 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028
curated by Emily Bills & Anthony Fontenot
