Silhouettes

The relationships of the silhouettes to one another derive not only from original encounters but imagined ones… Baer flips the image, inverts black and white, distorts and reshapes the bodies’ boundaries…The object is both image and broken free of image by the sharp tip of John Baer’s blade. Baer isolates the figure and looks for ways to reconstitute it, replacing parts of the body, most often the hands and feet, that had disappeared when he made the contrast fully negative or positive. (Alexa Dilworth, “Finding the shape in the form” in John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary / A Memoir in Photographs 1945-1954)

The photographs of skaters were taken at Rockefeller Center in 1953.