Pedro E. Guerrero on Being Inspired by the Masters

Mr. Guerrero’s photograph of the Ingalls rink at Yale, designed by Eero Saarinen.

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.