Pedro E. Guerrero

The Living Garage, 1959

Pedro E. Guerrero, who will turn 95 later this year, for many years was Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite lensman.

It is particularly welcome then, that the Julius Shulman Institute at the Woodbury School of Architecture in Burbank has organized Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life, the first major retrospective of his work, which traces his career from the late 1930s through the 1960s.  

We can see why America’s greatest architect favored Guerrero, for no other photographer has better understood how Wright integrated his buildings into their natural settings. But the architect’s sustained patronage was not enough to support Guerrero and his growing family, and after serving in the army during World War II he turned to commercial photography in New York City and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut - then the epicenter of Modernist residential design - though he always remained on call to shoot his mentor’s latest creations. Martin Filler, nybooks.