He still can remember the mornings when a big yellow cab would screech to a stop at 5th Avenue and 88th Street. A cane would poke out the door first. Then a porkpie hat. And, if it was cool outside, a flowing cape. Then America’s greatest architect would slap his hands against his pants pockets, hoping to hear the sound of loose change. Since Frank Lloyd Wright cared more about buildings than money, his flailing fingers rarely produced the desired clinking.
“Somebody had to come to his rescue,” photographer Pedro Guerrero is saying now, four decades later, looking out to the corner of 5th and 88th from inside the Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum. So Guerrero would dig the $1.25 fare out of his own pocket. Though a perpetual deadbeat, Wright usually would pay him back.
“I don’t know where he got the money,” the 76-year-old Guerrero says. “He probably hit up somebody else for it. It got to the point where he expected I’d be there with the money.”
It’s time for a little lunchtime reminiscing with the man who was Frank Lloyd Wright’s photographer from 1940 to 1959. From this privileged position, Guerrero could observe (and sometimes record) a master manipulator of images in unguarded moments-like the mornings in 1953 when Wright would leave his New York home away from home, Suite 223 at the Plaza Hotel, take a cab up 5th Avenue, then arrive at the present site of the Guggenheim, sans pocket change, to organize a show about his work.
This week, as the Museum of Modern Art unveils the first major Wright retrospective exhibition since the architect’s death in 1959, Guerrero is basking in reflected glory. Across West 53rd Street from the Modern, where “Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect” opened Sunday, the Look Gallery is displaying 25 Guerrero photographs of Wright. Meanwhile, Guerrero has just come out with a book, “Picturing Wright: An Album From Frank Lloyd Wright’s Photographer,” which retails for $29.95 in hardcover.
The book is really two stories. One is an intimate look at Wright, who emerges as far less selfish and arrogant than he is usually portrayed. The other is Guerrero’s own tale, an American dream come true. Born in an Arizona shack his Mexican-American father built for $300, he might have wound up in a menial clerk’s job. Instead, a lucky break allowed him to work for several noted American architects and artists, including Wright and sculptors Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson.
Guerrero hooked up with Wright this way: His father, a sign painter, bought paint from the same Phoenix store as Wright. Wright got his paint for the desert home and studio where he and his apprentices spent winters; the compound, in what is now Scottsdale, Ariz., is called Taliesin West. In 1939, Guerrero’s father asked the paint store owner to contact Wright on behalf of his son. The son, an aspiring photographer, showed up at Taliesin West in December 1939 with a portfolio that included a picture of a plate of ham and eggs, and a couple of artsy, seminude shots.
“I see you have a fondness for the ladies,” Wright said.
Guerrero replied: “I like women, of course, but I thought that the nudes show a proficiency that the ham and eggs don’t.”
“Are you married?”
“No, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Well, don’t marry until you’re 30 and then marry a girl of 19. She’ll keep you young. Young people today marry too early and then-right away-the babies. You’re not in a hurry, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Nothing. I’m unemployed.”
“Would you like to work for us? . . . The pay isn’t much, but you can eat here. You can start now.”
Unbeknownst to Guerrero, Wright’s photographer had run off the day before to get married. Wright desperately needed a replacement because the Museum of Modern Art was mounting a show of his work in 1940.
“I happened to come at absolutely the right time,” Guerrero says.
The war, then a move
Beginning in early 1940, he would photograph the architect and his apprentices at Taliesin West, as well as the original Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis. A few months after he began working for Wright, Guerrero became one of the apprentices himself. His stint lasted a year, then he went off to World War II. After the war, Guerrero and his family moved to New Canaan, Conn., where he lives today. At that time, he resumed his photography of Wright’s buildings, recording such significant postwar structures as the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pa., and the middle-income Jacobs House in Madison, Wis.
Different experts say different things about Guerrero’s architectural photography.
“He did many fine interpretations of Wright’s works,” says Jack Hedrich, former president of the distinguished Chicago architectural photography studio, Hedrich-Blessing. But, Hedrich adds, “He isn’t in the forefront of leading the school of architectural photography to new heights.”
Chicago architect John Eifler, who referred to Guerrero’s photographs in restoring the Jacobs House, is more positive. “His whole training really came from Wright leaning over his shoulder telling him how to take shots. . . . He got one heck of a training. The shots of the Jacobs House are first-rate.”
Years of changes
Guerrero is semiretired now, and the raven shock of hair that once crowned his head is gone. A whitish-gray mustache and sideburns pop out from his brown skin. His voice is still resonant, and a smile spreads across his face as quickly as he dishes out one-liners. His only affectation is a red, blue and green silk neckerchief. But it could pass for a bowtie underneath the heavy black sweater he’s wearing. Besides, the neckerchief pales in comparison with Wright’s get-ups.
At the moment, Guerrero is dining on chicken pesto and organic greens at the Guggenheim’s Dean and Deluca cafe. On the walls above him are framed black and white photographs (not his) of the Guggenheim, including one of Wright leaning over the spiraling ledge of its rotunda.
Wright called him “Pete,” not “Pedro.” And for years, Guerrero tried to play down his Hispanic identity, using names like “P. Edward Guerrero.” He even thought about using the name “Peter Edward.” But with age and self-assurance, as well as times that have made ethnicity fashionable, he has gone back to “Pedro.”
“I made peace with who I was,” he says.
He has not had much peace with his book; the project has been 22 years in the making and was rejected, he acknowledges, by a couple of New York-based publishers before Pomegranate Artbooks of Rohnert Park, Calif., took it on.
Wright the man
The book pictures Wright in informal guises altogether absent from the scholarly Museum of Modern Art show.
Here is the great man picnicking in an apple orchard, playing the organ at a wedding of two apprentices, sharpening a pencil in his studio. There he is sitting in his private study and bedroom, surrounded by some of his favorite things-two of his many Japanese prints on a window ledge, and, on his desk, three ears of homegrown corn. If you look closely, you can see stubble on his face.
Wright insisted on inspecting everything Guerrero photographed and once ordered him to destroy a set of architectural photographs he thought poorly composed. But he gave no orders to the photographer with respect to representing his buildings or himself, only advice regarding architectural photography.
When Guerrero, who was 5-foot-5 1/2, wondered if he was tall enough to be an architectural photographer, Wright, who stood 5-8, said: “Don’t think of yourself as short. Think of anyone taller than you as a weed. I do.”
Guerrero took the portraits of Wright on his own; the architect didn’t request them. “This is a pretty damn great guy,” the photographer says. “Lots of people think he was a curmudgeon. . . . I knew an extremely different man”-relaxed, genial, generous, funny, and concerned about the smallest details of his apprentices’ lives.
When Guerrero left Taliesin to enlist, Wright pressed two $100 bills into his palm even though the architect, a pacifist, opposed the war.
One up on Mr. Wright
Yet for all his admiration of Wright-whom he still respectfully refers to as “Mr. Wright,” never “Frank”-Guerrero never has been blind to the architect’s blind spots. When Guerrero began work at Taliesin West, for example, Wright insisted that the photographer use one of Wright’s old cameras. It had no shutter and only one lens, and produced “clumsy” negatives, Guerrero says.
Wright backed off after Guerrero threw one of his many homilies back at him: “It’s not the pencil but the man.” In other words, “Let me use my own camera.”
Guerrero’s pluck came in handy one summer day in 1940 when Wright was taking a canoe ride across the Wisconsin River to a picnic. Guerrero raced to the shoreline and used his own handheld camera to record a telling snapshot: Wright was in shorts and shirt-sleeves, but he still found it necessary to carry his cane.
Perhaps, had the canoe sunk, Wright planned to reach shore by walking on water.
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Pedro Guerrero will speak at 7:30 p.m. April 27 at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park. For information, call 708-848-1500. An exhibition of his photographs will appear at the Kelmscott Gallery, 4611 N. Lincoln Ave., from May 3-28. Call 312-784-2559 for more information.
