Questions for Pedro Guerrero, Photographer The architectural photographer Pedro E. Guerrero was a contemporary of the more famous Julius Shulman and trained at what is now the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. After World War II, he lived in New Canaan, Conn., where he photographed the work of modern architects like Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson for House & Garden, Vogue and other magazines. And later in his career, he documented the work of the sculptors Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder. But Mr. Guerrero, 94, is best known for his 20-year friendship and working relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright, his first client. A number of his portraits of Wright, including a series of 12 images of the architect's hands demonstrating the difference between organic and conventional architecture, will be on display at the Woodbury Hollywood Gallery in Los Angeles, as part of a career retrospective - Mr. Guerrero's first - organized by the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University. The show, curated by the institute's director, Emily Bills, and Anthony Fontenot, runs April 5 to 25. We spoke with Mr. Guerrero by phone from his home in Florence, Ariz., where he was sorting through his archive of back issues of Architectural Record and House & Garden, reminiscing about some of the images that will appear in the exhibition. How did you become an architectural photographer? I left Arizona on my 20th birthday, trying to recreate myself. There was the beginning of what has now become a chronic bigotry against Mexicans. In those days, I began to feel the rejection. I realized there was not too much of an opportunity in Arizona. I was looking for a place I could go that would give people a reason for recognizing who I was or what I did. So you went to art school in Los Angeles. I went to art school without any evidence that I was an artist. All the art courses were filled, so I asked what else they taught and they said, "Photography." The first print I made I fell in love, and I gave up everything but photography after that. I was not a very good student, because I didn't like their assignments. I just did the kind of work I wanted to do. What kind of work was that? The work I did in the early days were kind of ridiculous things. A little girl and dog at the beach, a dead pelican, net menders. Things that had nothing to do with commercial work. I spent two years there, and I decided I was a photographer enough, even though the school did not think so. Was that when you met Frank Lloyd Wright? My dad saw me wandering around not knowing what to do with my new craft. He had followed the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had just moved to Arizona at the time. He said, "Why don't you go see that fellow Wright up on the hill?" When I first showed up there, Wright wanted to know who I was. I said, "My name is Pedro Guerrero, and I am a photographer." I had never introduced myself that way before. He said, "Come in and show me what you can do." How did you learn how to photograph architecture? Seeing Mr. Wright's work in the desert, I decided I would approach it like sculpture. That pleased him very much. I started photographing Taliesin West as sculpture. What happened - and this may sound arrogant - was I had a great sense of composition. I say that I have a direct line between my shutter finger and my brain. My brain tells me when I see something and I should take one. That's my technique. Did Wright make suggestions? He told me I should remember he designed his houses from a sitting position. He was only three or four inches taller than I was, and he didn't want bird's-eye views or worm's-eye views. He wanted me to photograph a house that he would recognize as being his. After the war you moved to New Canaan and became friends with modernist architects like Marcel Breuer. I photographed his house in 1949, after the war, but before I moved to New Canaan. To see the simplicity of Marcel Breuer's house - it was so angular, so cantilevered. I was looking at it the other day and I was thinking, "How could I have accepted this work after doing Wright?" What other architects" work did you find memorable? The Eero Saarinen ice skating rink at Yale University and the I.B.M. building in Yorktown Heights. I liked Saarinen's own techniques, his individuality, his curves. It was so different from Wright or Ed Stone or Breuer. I liked that the I.B.M. building had a bit of the ice skating rink in it too. Are you still taking photographs? Following my inspiration from Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder, I have been making mobiles out of rusted materials, old shovels, old rakes, old saws. People who have found out I am doing that and approve of it have made my place here a junkyard. Every time I look out my front window, people have dropped off a whole carload of rusty tin cans. I have a title for it, which is "Rust in Peace." I can hardly wait to get up in the morning so I can do something different.