Picturing Wright: Album from Frank Lloyd Wright's Photographer

(Hardback)

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A revised and expanded edition of this intimate photographic chronicle the world of Frank Lloyd Wright by his official photographer Pedro E. Guerrero. When twenty-two-year-old Pedro Guerrero took his short portfolio to Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in 1939, he didn't know that he was about to start his long career by being Wright's official photographer for the next twenty years. Picturing Wright draws together 175 of Guerrero's photographs of the master architect, his homes, and his legendary workshops-including rarely seen color photographs published for the first time. The result is a moving, personal album that will delight everyone who is entranced by Wright and his work. Now back in print with several dozen images unseen in the original edition, Picturing Wright comes alive with Guerrero's illuminating, often humorous stories, augmented in this edition by his widow, Dixie Guerrero. Picturing Wright remains one of the most thoroughgoing visual profiles of a man who meticulously crafted and managed his public persona, but seen here in numerous unguarded moments. The value of Guerrero's rare access extended to Wright's late works; some of the photos are the only ones documenting projects on completion, before changes made by subsequent owners.

Reviews

Guerrero took some of the most candid photographs of the man Martin Filler calls 'the greatest architect the United States had ever produced and perhaps this country's greatest artist in any medium.' They include everyday moments, like Wright ringing the dinner bell at Taliesin near Spring Green, overseeing the haying, donning quasi-royal Montenegrin dress and high Cuban heels one Halloween night and having tea in the garden room while perusing Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with his wife, Olgivanna. Those pictures of the couple are presumed to be their last together. There are lovely shots of many of Wright's projects, taken over time, including the many years of work to Taliesin West. In the end, though, the book may be most worth having because of the stories told by this photographer, who for decades called Frank Lloyd Wright his friend. --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Author Bio

Pedro Guerrero (1917-2012) spent his career of more than 60 years photographing the most illustrious American architects and artists of the twentieth century. Frank Lloyd Wright hired him at the age of twenty-two in 1939 to photograph Taliesin West, Wright's Arizona workshop and home. Guerrero would go on to photograph him and the master's late works for the next twenty years, until Wright's death. Guerrero went on to document the groundbreaking modernist works of Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson and Edward Durell Stone, as well as such legendary figures as Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, John Huston, Julia Child, and Alexey Brodovitch. Martin Filler is an American architecture critic. He has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1985 and his writing on modern architecture has been published in more than thirty journals, magazines, and newspapers in the US, Europe, and Japan. He is the author of Makers of Modern Architecture- From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (2007) and Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II- From Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas (2013).