JOHN BAER (1920-1994) 

In 1945, while serving in the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, John Baer acquired a Leica camera from a captured German soldier. His first photographs were of his fellow soldiers, weary from war.

Soon after the war John and his wife Louise moved to New York City, rented an apartment in the East Village, and connected with a community of artists and writers.

In 1950 they journeyed to France and spent the next year living in Montpellier and traveling throughout Postwar Europe. John’s photographs capture a world struggling to understand itself following years of war and political realignment.

In 1951 John and Louise returned to New York and their apartment in the East Village. John walked the streets, taking pictures that provide glimpses of ordinary people in the unguarded moments of their lives—at work, at rest, at play. He developed negatives and made prints in a make-shift darkroom in the bathroom of their fifth floor walk-up.

Sometime in the mid-1950s, John stowed his photographic life away. After his death, in 1994, his son Andrew found boxes containing thousands of negatives and prints from between 1945 and 1954. For 27 years the boxes moved whenever Andrew did. Finally, in 2021, Andrew and his wife Megan Moynihan dove into the boxes to see what stories they held. Stories of Europe emerging from the darkness of war. Stories of New York City brimming with the optimism of the early 1950s. Stories of a generation and stories of John Baer, seen through the lens of his Leica.