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The story of how John Baer got here to be a photographer is without doubt one of the most intriguing origin tales within the self-discipline. In 1945, serving with the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, he acquired a Leica from a captured German soldier. Then he pointed it at his war-weary comrades and began making footage.
That’s it. No formal research or coaching, no darkroom apprenticeship, no photographic idea. Just a person, a commandeered digicam and an intuition that turned out to be fairly extraordinary.
John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945-1954 (John Baer Archive, September 2026) collects the work he revamped the next decade: in postwar France and Germany, then in Spain then New York City, crackling with postwar power.
And wanting on the footage, it is laborious to consider that no one has seen them earlier than.
The gentle management, the compositional intuition, the timing: that is the work of somebody who understood the medium at an intuitive stage. Even although Baer was, by commerce, a journalist and later a public relations man, pictures was apparently simply one thing he did.
There’s dramatic irony in the truth that the digicam was a Leica; the identical light-weight, exact instrument that Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank carried by way of the postwar years.
John was capturing Europe and New York on the actual second when avenue pictures was defining itself as an artwork kind, working with the identical instruments, in a few of the identical cities. He simply by no means advised anybody.
When Baer died in 1994, his son Andrew discovered a trio of bins containing more than 4,000 negatives, silver gelatin prints and contact sheets. They sat largely untouched for another 27 years.
Finally, in 2021, Andrew and his wife, Megan Moynihan, began to scan the negatives. What emerged was a complete, coherent body of work: two distinct chapters separated by the Atlantic, united by a unique sensibility.
In Europe, Baer shot Communist Party posters calling for US withdrawal, with an octopus in the Stars and Stripes strangling the map of France. He captured boys playing with toy guns in Franco’s Spain; German cities mid-reconstruction; a Munich junction so clogged with cyclists it looks like a scene from another civilization.
The war was over, but its residue was everywhere.
His New York work, meanwhile, is more playful, more formally ambitious. A shadow study shot from above, of a lone pedestrian dwarfed by the elongated geometry of his own silhouette, is the kind of picture that photographers still try to make from high vantage points.
A rain-soaked Lexington Avenue, with a lone umbrella-carrier reflected in the flooded street below, is equally arresting. A double-exposure image titled Louise Twice, in which his wife appears as a ghost against a busy New York street scene, shows a level of technical curiosity that goes well beyond point-and-shoot.
What’s striking about the full body of work is its consistency. There are no duds in this selection, no learning-curve pictures, no obvious failures of timing. Either Baer edited his negatives with exceptional ruthlessness before boxing them away, or the instinct was there from the start.
The book has been produced by Paper Cinema Editions under creative director Yolanda Cuomo, whose credits include Magnum America and work with Aperture, with an essay by Alexa Dilworth. At 248 pages and 10 x 12 inches, it’s a serious study of a body of work that has waited decades for serious treatment.
John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945–1954 will be published by John Baer Archive on September 15 priced $65 (approximately £49 / AU$90). Visit the John Baer Archive website for extra particulars.
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