PEDRO E. GUERRERO: PHOTOGRAPHS OF MODERN LIFE

Watch the video of Pedro E. Guerrero in conversation with art critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp on April 5, 2012. The talk accompanied the Julius Shulman Institute’s exhibition Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life at Woodbury University’s Hollywood Gallery.

Exhibition information:

Sunday June 9, 2013 – November 1, 2013
New Canaan Historical Society
(Offices) 13 Oenoke Ridge Road
New Canaan, Connecticut 06840
phone: 203 966-1776
http://www.nchistory.org/

The exhibition is in the Gores Pavilion, located in Irwin Park on Weed Street.
Irwin Park is located at the intersection of Weed Street and Wahackme Road

Exhibition opening and presentation of the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award:
Sunday June 9, 2013, 2 pm
Gores Pavilion
New Canaan Historical Society
The Gores Pavilion is located in Irwin Park on Weed Street
Irwin Park is located at the intersection of Weed Street and Wahackme Road

For more information contact:

Janet Lindstron, Executive Director
New Canaan Historical Society
phone: 203 966-1776

Gallery hours:
The Gores Pavilion is open from Friday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., or by appointment; call 203-966-1776. Admission is free to Society members and $5 for non-members.

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.

Curated by Emily Bills and Anthony Fontenot