Andrew Baer on Discovering His Father’s Lost Photo Archive

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Recently, we shared the remarkable work of John Baer in the feature article, John Baer: What We Leave Behind. In this episode of the SPM Podcast, we sat down with John’s son, Andrew, to hear even more about the discovery of John’s photos and what they’ve meant to John’s family and, by extension, an entire generation of people.

When John died in 1994, Andrew Baer discovered four boxes in the basement containing prints, contact sheets and envelopes filled with negatives. He took them home and, remarkably, carried them with him for another 27 years before he and his wife, Megan, decided it was finally time to take a closer look.

In this episode of the Street Photography Magazine Podcast, Andrew takes us behind the scenes of that process: learning to digitize the negatives, researching the places and people John photographed, retracing his parents’ travels through postwar Europe and assembling a dream team that would eventually help turn the collection into a book.

As Andrew puts it, working with the photographs over the past several years has been a way of “almost recovering” his father’s memory. And it’s allowed him to see his father, and his mother, Louise, as people beyond the roles he had known them in growing up.

Today, that work continues through the John Baer Archive, a nonprofit created to preserve the collection and find new ways for people to engage with it. John’s photographs have already inspired writing, painting and even ballet, and Andrew hopes there are uses for the archive that he and Megan haven’t imagined yet.

Listen to our conversation with Andrew for the fascinating story of what happened after those boxes came out of the basement, and how a family discovery became something much bigger.