Images of Wright sites are themselves artworks

By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic

Architectural photography is a peculiar business. In one sense, it’s a species of advertising, existing to show off a building to prospective clients and simply document what someone else has created. Few people therefore succeed in making architectural photos that are works of art--and even then the architect often proves stronger than the photographer.

Pedro Guerrero’s images of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright are a notable exception.

In the small exhibition of prints at the ArchiTech Gallery are images that are graphically as modern and daring as the structures.

Many significant photographers shot works by Wright. None did it for as long a time – 20 years – as Guerrero. The pieces on view are of the Taliesin and Taliesin West buildings, plus some Wright portraits. Despite strong, isolated images of Wright buildings by Bill Hedrich, Edmund Teske and Ezra Stoller, you will never see a sustained group of pictures that surpasses Guerrero’s in formal power.

The best ones on show – ArchiTech has many more – are of Taliesin West, where the structures can be continually related, as Wright intended, to desert and sky. Guerrero’s gift is in isolating parts of the building to stand for the whole. He deals here in essences, massive forms reproduced in ink black that are frequently as challenging as abstractions by Franz Kline. They are great pictures, clearly more than documents.

[September 23, 2005]