Press: Digital Camera World
The story of how John Baer came to be a photographer is one of the most intriguing origin stories in the 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 started making pictures.
That's it. No formal study or training, no darkroom apprenticeship, no photographic theory. Just a man, a commandeered camera and an instinct that turned out to be quite extraordinary.
John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945-1954 (John Baer Archive, September 2026) collects the work he made over the following decade: in postwar France and Germany, then in Spain then New York City, crackling with postwar energy.