Lenscratch

JOHN BAER: THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY / A MEMOIR IN PHOTOGRAPHS, 1945–1954

By Alexa Dilworth / October 12, 2026

Photograph © Alexa Dilworth

...Like Baer’s prints of the pavers on Fifth Avenue, the silhouettes are featureless: they are recognizable only in what they are doing, riding a bike, walking a dog, waddling along the sidewalk like Charlie Chaplin. Yet they possess a kind of deep interiority, fullness rather than lack. Without character or inferred plot to obscure them, the silhouettes are a mirror, a shadowy reflection, of John’s earlier work, his interest in people, events, what was happening in the light and dark, the moment.

...The relationships of the silhouettes to one another derive not only from original encounters but imagined ones. There are multiple iterations and expressions of the same figures, and many bear the traces of John’s extractions and substitutions: they are marked by grease pencil, black and white paint, and Exacto blade. Baer flips the image, inverts black and white, distorts and reshapes the bodies’ boundaries.

…The silhouettes are alive in ways that call my attention away from the subject of the pictures to the pictures themselves, their composition and construction, the interests evident from John’s beginnings.

Paving Fifth Avenue

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