Andrew Baer and Megan Moynihan — JOHN BAER The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945-1954

Review by Lee Halvorsen •

Imagine sitting in an overstuffed chair, in a hushed, book-lined sanctuary, completely spellbound by a virtuoso storyteller spinning tales of love, war, resilience, post-war recovery in Europe and the canvas of artistic mid-century New York City. This wonderful collection of firsthand images of post-war transitions in Europe and Manhattan was made by John Baer who turned 25 as a soldier in Europe as the war was winding down. With a found Leica camera he discovered his passion and talent for making images that weave the fabric of the moment and the emotions of those present.

The images are wonderful, the sequencing is stunning, the stories are captivating but for me…the strongest “theme” was the love story of John Baer and his wife Louise Fuoss. What an adventure: married in the midst of wartime, briefly living in post-war Cape Cod before traveling in Europe for a year and then settling in New York’s East Village.

Through the last year of the war and then for almost ten years, John used his Leica to connect with places, people and events. He built a darkroom and honed not only his photographic skills, but also film developing and print making talents. Then suddenly, in 1954 he put his film, his negatives, his notes, his prints and everything about that artistic phase of his life in boxes, storing them in the basement where they stayed until he passed in 1994. His son, Andrew inherited the boxes, stored them for years, paying them little mind, carrying them wherever he moved, until COVID. During the solitude of the pandemic, Andrew and his wife Megan Moynihan brought out the boxes, and I imagine it was like opening a treasure chest.

They found thousands of images on film and print and contact sheets with notes and diagrams. They began scanning the images and found them of incredible quality in composition and technical attributes. Andrew and Megan’s sequencing adds a texture to the chronology of the story. The book’s story begins in the last year of the war where John witnessed the horror of combat and the inhumanity of the concentration camps. Instead, he gave us U.S. soldiers playing baseball, writing home, trying to stay awake on an exhausting train ride in France. Because of the notes and annotations in John’s work, additional context is available and the reader can follow John and Louise on their journeys. There aren’t many images of Louise, but they pop up occasionally, which had me imagining the two, walking hand-in-hand (and one hand with a camera) in Europe and Manhattan…and she is on the cover of the book!! They eventually divorced then remarried and divorced again. I can imagine the energy.

John’s images demonstrate that his skills matured and diversified. I appreciate the way he treated perspective, for instance, when they first moved to the East Village, he made many of the images looking down on the street from his 5^th floor walkup. Perhaps a metaphor for not quite fitting in yet. His images gradually moved to street level where he immersed himself and his camera in the real feel of the City…nothing posed, nothing glamorous, just real people making life happen.

Water had long been a part of family life and John did not leave it out of his photo archives. He spent hours making hundreds of images of water’s patterns, light, flows, reflections and more. In his work with water images the art became more abstract eventually moving into a significant study of silhouettes.

Another love story perhaps, is the one of family love. Andrew, who called his father “John,” has created, along with his wife Megan Moynihan, the John Baer Archive, a non-profit dedicated to sharing his father’s images and view of life. I call that a family love story.

The book will launch on September 17 with an exhibition September 17-19 in the White Loft in New York City. This book was a comfort to hold, like that overstuffed chair, easy to sink into John Baer’s life view. These were the “good old days” we hear so much about, a man and his camera capturing hope, love, and change with each shutter click.

Lee Halvorsen is assistant editor, writer and visual artist living in Virginia.

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JOHN BAER The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945-1954 Edited by Andrew Baer and Megan Moynihan

Artist: Photographer, John Baer

Foreword: Andrew Baer

Essay: Alexa Dilworth

Photos on bottom of pages 238 and 239 and top of 240 © Alexa Dilworth

Photographs of Chevalier Ballet’s New York Stories, May 2024 on pg 245 are (top) ©Kadri Karmo and (bottom) © Lushi Song

Publisher: John Baer Archive

Design: Yolanda Cuomo, Paper Cinema Edition

Website for purchasing book.

Printed in Italy by EBS Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei.