There’s something irresistible about the story of a great body of photographic work discovered in boxes decades after it was made. It must be the mystery of it. Thousands of negatives sitting unseen, just waiting for someone to realize what they are.
That’s part of what drew me into the story of John Baer. But after talking with his son, Andrew, I found myself thinking less about the discovery and more about what, exactly, had been discovered. It wasn’t just photographs that Andrew found. It was a piece of his father.
John Baer died in 1994. After his death, Andrew found boxes in the basement of his father’s Rhode Island home containing prints, contact sheets and thousands of negatives. Andrew took them with him, but for another 27 years, most of what was inside remained unseen. It wasn’t until 2021 that he and his wife, Megan Moynihan, began seriously exploring the collection.
What emerged was an extraordinary photographic record spanning roughly a decade, from the final days of World War II through postwar Europe and into the streets of 1950s New York City. More than that, it offered Andrew a way to meet a version of his father he had never really known. When Bob Patterson and I spoke with him for the Street Photography Magazine Podcast, we asked Andrew if he was surprised by what he found, by the insights the photos offered him into his father. “I wouldn’t say surprised,” he told us candidly. Instead, he said it was more of “a rounding out and enriching and coloring” of his father. I couldn’t stop thinking, the fact that photographs can do that is astounding.
A Camera and a Way of Seeing
John Baer was born in 1920 in Bolivar, Pennsylvania, and studied journalism at Penn State, where he worked on the student newspaper and met Louise Fuoss, the woman he would eventually marry. World War II interrupted that life. He served with the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion in Europe, and in 1945 acquired a Leica III from a captured German soldier. It was an unlikely beginning for a photographer.
As far as Andrew has been able to tell, his father had no formal photographic training. Yet he began using the Leica while still overseas, photographing the soldiers around him and the strange in-between world they inhabited as the war ended. The photos are unique in that they aren’t the grand, dramatic images of war that most of us have seen from that time. Instead, they are just photos of people. That’s what comes through. Young men ride a train, soldiers play ball near a farmhouse as German children watch. There are people waiting, talking and occupying the spaces around John. Andrew sees something important about his father in those photographs: empathy.
He told us a story from his childhood that made that observation feel especially significant. When Andrew was about seven, his father brought home a German friend named Kurt. Andrew learned that Kurt had served in the German army. For a child raised in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the revelation was a bit jarring. After all, weren’t Germans the enemy? But Andrew remembers his father telling him, “If I’d been born in Germany, I probably would have been in the German army too. That’s just the way it was.” That ability to see the person before the stereotype seems to run through John’s photography.
“I think his photographs are respectful of people and I think they’re very empathetic,” Andrew said. “His pictures are not of people doing odd things, nor are they heroic, they’re not dramatic. They’re just people.”
Europe, Then New York
After the war, John and Louise eventually settled in New York City, but theirs doesn’t seem to have been a particularly conventional postwar life. In 1950, they went back to Europe. Why they did it is one of the mysteries Andrew would most like to solve. Neither came from wealth. John grew up in a coal-mining town; Louise in a paper-mill town. They were young and still establishing themselves. Yet they packed up and spent close to a year living in Montpellier, France, and traveling through France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
Andrew and Megan have gone to impressive lengths trying to reconstruct that period. They’ve researched family records, newspaper archives and military documents. They’ve traveled to places John photographed, sometimes using architectural details in his pictures to pinpoint exactly where he had been. But that particular question has gone unanswered. What remains are the photographs.
John’s Europe is not a collection of monuments or picturesque travel scenes. His camera found a continent still carrying the evidence of war: political posters, rebuilding cities, children playing, ordinary people returning to ordinary routines.
When John and Louise returned to New York in 1951, his attention shifted with his surroundings. He photographed people in parks, workers on the streets, pedestrians seen from above, reflections in rainwater and strangers caught in those small gestures that make street photography so endlessly fascinating. He developed his negatives and made prints in a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of their fifth-floor East Village walk-up.
One of my favorite photographs from the archive shows four women on a bench during their lunch hour at Bryant Park. One woman talks while the other three lean in attentively. Tea is clearly being spilled. It’s one of those timeless, universal shots, a scene that is comforting in a way because it repeats itself in every country, and across every generation. True, nothing monumental is happening, but I’d argue that that’s exactly what makes it so good.
An Artist Still Experimenting
It would be easy to look at John’s photographs and think of him purely as an intuitive observer. But the deeper Andrew and Megan went into the archive, the clearer it became that John was also experimenting seriously with the medium.
One of his most striking bodies of work depicts the men paving Fifth Avenue in 1953, their figures emerging through steam and smoke. That same year, John and his college friend Barney Weinberg exhibited at the Abingdon Square Painters gallery in New York.
Then his work began moving even further toward abstraction. Andrew showed us examples during our conversation that were a surprising departure from his early work. John made hundreds of photographs of skaters at Rockefeller Center. He manipulated some into stark silhouettes. Then he began physically cutting figures from different prints with a razor blade and combining them, sometimes creating entirely new groupings of people who had never actually stood together. Hands or feet from one figure might become part of another. No Photoshop, obviously. Just prints, scissors or blades, tape, and an enormous amount of patience.
It made me reconsider the photographer I thought I’d been looking at. The observant photographer documenting soldiers and ordinary street life was still there, but he was evolving. His interest wasn’t limited to recording what was in front of him. He was beginning to ask what else a photograph could become. And then, sometime around the mid-1950s, the serious photography seems to have stopped. No one knows exactly why.
Andrew was born in 1952. His brother followed a few years later. John had work and a family to support. The Baers moved to the suburbs. Life changed. During our conversation, I wondered aloud whether place might have mattered too. John’s most concentrated photographic years coincided with enormous changes in scenery and circumstance: war, Europe, New York. Perhaps suburban life simply didn’t provoke the same photographic response. It’s only a theory. Whatever the reason, John packed away the work, but he didn’t stop being curious.
Andrew remembers a father interested in energy conservation long before it became commonplace, an organic gardener ordering unusual seeds, an adventurous cook tracking down unfamiliar ingredients, and a man who remained intellectually engaged with the world around him. Photography may have disappeared from the center of his life, but the person behind those photographs didn’t.
Getting to Know Your Father Again
There’s a moment in our interview that I think gets to the heart of this story. Bob pointed out that when we’re children, our parents are simply our parents. We don’t necessarily think about the people they were before us. We don’t picture them at 25, making decisions we might have made ourselves, falling in love, traveling, trying things, making art, changing direction. Through John’s photographs, Andrew has been given an unusual opportunity to do exactly that.
Over the past six years, he and Megan haven’t just worked to preserve and share John’s archive. They’ve researched the places he went, the people he knew and the events he photographed, piecing together parts of a life that John himself never fully explained to them. “In some ways it’s to remember for him,” he said of the project.
Looking at the photographs from occupied Germany and the years that followed, Andrew described the process as “almost recovering, if you will, his memory.” I love that idea. Because John didn’t leave behind an autobiography explaining all of this. There are still enormous gaps. Andrew doesn’t know why his parents returned to Europe. He doesn’t know why his father eventually put the camera away. He can’t ask what John was thinking when he made a particular frame. The photographs don’t answer those questions. But they do tell Andrew something about how his father looked at the world: Thoughtful, observant, curious, experimental, empathetic. That in itself is a remarkable thing to inherit.
The Extraordinary Ordinary
John’s photographs are now getting an audience they never had during his lifetime. The archive has become a nonprofit devoted to preserving and sharing the work, and the book John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945–1954 brings together this long-hidden period of his life. The project has grown with the help of an impressive team, including creative director Yolanda Cuomo, editor and essayist Alexa Dilworth and photographer and master printer Jonno Rattman.
What I find especially interesting is that Andrew and Megan don’t want the archive simply preserved behind glass. They want John’s photographs to keep doing things. His images have already been incorporated into ballet performances. Teachers have used them as writing prompts. Artists have made paintings from them. Andrew hopes institutions will eventually preserve the collection, but he also talks enthusiastically about people finding uses for the photographs that he and Megan haven’t even imagined yet. That feels right for this body of work. After all, John’s photographs are full of people whose names we’ll probably never know. A man sleeping on a park bench. Workers paving a street. Children watching soldiers play ball. A couple sitting together. People passing through a city on an ordinary day. John noticed them, and now, decades later, we notice John.
What Will Our Photographs Say About Us?
As photographers, we spend so much time thinking about photographs individually. Is this frame good? Should I share it? Does it belong in the series? Will someone publish it? Will someone like it? But eventually, if we keep at it, photographs become something else. They accumulate and, whether we intend them to or not, they begin to say something about us. They show where we went, what held our attention, who we loved, what made us stop walking, what we thought was worth remembering.
John Baer could never have known that his son would one day sit with thousands of his negatives, trying to reconstruct the young man behind the camera. He couldn’t have known that people who had never met him would eventually study those photographs, publish them, dance in front of them, write from them or recognize their own parents’ generation in them. In fact, John never even showed Andrew the photographs that now tell him so much about his father. It’s something worth thinking about. Most of us aren’t sitting on a forgotten archive that will someday be hailed as an important photographic discovery. That’s not really the point. The point is that our photographs don’t have to become historically important to become important to someone.
Maybe they’ll help a child understand who we were before they knew us. Maybe they’ll remind someone what their neighborhood used to look like. Maybe they’ll preserve the face of someone whose name would otherwise be forgotten. Maybe they’ll simply show the people we love what we found beautiful. But only if they survive us. And, perhaps just as importantly, only if we let other people see them.
So make the photographs. Print them, label them. Put them in albums and books. Share them with your family. Tell people the stories behind them while you’re still around to answer the questions. Because you never really know what you’re leaving behind. Sometimes it’s a box of negatives, and sometimes it’s a way back to you.
John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945–1954 is available to purchase now. The John Baer Archive will also present an exhibition and book launch at White Loft in New York City, September 17–19. More information about John Baer, the archive, the book and upcoming exhibitions is available through the John Baer Archive.
