by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a PBS American
Masters program about Pedro
Guerrero, a photographer who’s famous mainly for his three long-term
collaborations with artists — architect Frank Lloyd Wright, mobile sculptor
Alexander Calder and sculptor Louise Nevelson (who, not surprisingly given the
sexism of the art world in general — interestingly, Guerrero encountered racist
prejudices at home in Arizona when he was growing up but not in the art world the way Nevelson had to deal with
entrenched sexism that treated women artists as less “serious” than men — and
which may have something to do with the fact that I didn’t recognize her name
instantly the way I did with Wright and Calder). Guerrero is shown being
interviewed as an old man (he died in 2012, living long enough to appear in the
film but not long enough to see the completed version), and among the
interviewees was his wife Dixie Legler, who was about half his age and
therefore I guessed (correctly) he’d been married before. In some respects the
most interesting part of the film was the early scenes with Wright, who hired
Guerrero to photograph the school he established in Arizona, Taliesin West, and
Guerrero came up with a series of pictures with an almost tactile sense of
perspective (both Guerrero and others discussed the difficulty of creating a
sense of three-dimensionality in a flat 2-D medium like still photography) as
well as some great shots of Guerrero himself (as an old man he was pretty
nondescript-looking but as a young man he was a hunk, and there’s one particular shot of him leaning
against one of the Taliesin buildings, dressed in a T-shirt and tight blue
jeans showing an enviable basket, oddly premonitory of the opening shot of Brokeback
Mountain) and the shirtless guys
working on building Taliesin West.
That was neat, though the rest of the show was also compelling and made me
wonder how many fantastic artists we’ve never heard of because their work,
their ethnicity or their gender just put them on the margins of the art world.
Guerrero enlisted during World War II (much to the displeasure of Frank Lloyd
Wright, an avowed and outspoken pacifist, but though his surrogate father might
have been against it Guerrero’s real father insisted it was his duty to serve, not only to his country but also to Mexican-Americans in
general to prove their loyalty to the U.S.) and afterwards settled in New York
City. With his experience at Taliesin he got lots of assignments to photograph
buildings, particularly interiors of houses for House and Garden magazine, a gig which lasted 20 years and was his
key source of income until he lost it in a quirky and very 1960’s way. It seems the New Jersey town in which
he lived appointed him to their draft board, and Guerrero, who may have served
in World War II but though the Viet Nam war stupid and pointless, used that
position to get a lot of
people conscientious-objector deferments. The New York Times broke the story that there was a pacifist on a New
Jersey draft board who was using his position to monkey-wrench the system, and House
and Garden abruptly decided they
would never again employ Guerrero or publish his photographs. So he forsook the
world of commercial photography and concentrated on artistic jobs, including
documenting Calder’s 1964 exhibit at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim
Museum (thereby combining two of his great mentors in one show) and also
working with Nevelson on the considerable challenge of documenting her
black-on-black constructions with found materials. While the show tended to
drag after a while — at least with the approach they took, there was barely
enough material in Guerrero’s life for an hour-long program — it was a quite
interesting look at a highly unusual talent and a good co-production for American
Masters and Latino Public
Broadcasting’s Voces program
(and one presumes there’s an alternate version with the narration in Spanish
for the Voces-affiliated stations).
