All his life, Guerrero spoke bitterly of the casual bigotry he encountered growing up in Mesa, and he viewed his acceptance in 1937 to the Art Center School, then in Los Angeles, as deliverance.
Guerrero's seven-decade career in photography began in 1939 when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright impulsively hired him to record the ongoing construction at his winter home, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Guerrero recorded the original Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and other Wright projects before enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1941.
Guerrero's understanding of Wright, forged both in the drafting room and while waiting for the sun to fall just so on a redwood beam, made him an important interpreter of the architect's work.
He established an international reputation photographing the world as it built and rebuilt, developing a particular specialty in the mid-century modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s, including those of Eero Saarinen, Edward Durell Stone, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Philip Johnson, John Black Lee and Joseph Salerno.
Any unhappiness he felt at being black-listed[citation needed] was compensated by the opportunity to shadow Calder, whose playful mobiles, stabiles, jewelry and homemade kitchen tools intrigued him every bit as much as Wright's masterpieces.
[6] The documentary Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey (Paradigm Productions) was aired in fall 2015 as a co-presentation of Latino Public Broadcasting's VOCES and WNET American Masters.