©John Baer Archive, jacket, front cover, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, jacket, front cover, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, case binding, front and back, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, Opening the Box, The Extraordinary Ordinary

John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary, A Memoir in Photographs, 1945–1954, edited by Andrew Baer and Megan Moynihan, and published by the John Baer Archive and Paper Cinema Editions, is the definition of a labor of love, from start to finish. Andrew, John Baer’s son, poignantly writes that he and Megan called this book a memoir “as a way to remember John, and in some way, remember for him.”

I was struck by the intricacies of constructing a memoir for someone else, of sharing stories that aren’t one’s own. Baer left no journals or writing behind, so the travels and encounters that we experience in this book through John’s eyes were largely unknown to Andrew.

Andrew writes of when he first looked through his father’s archive:

First I saw the photographs—men paving Fifth Avenue, lovers in Washington Square . . . weary soldiers on a French train, and John Baer and Louise Fuoss when they were young and in love.

John Baer was my father. My brother, Joe, and I never called him Dad. John was John, and Louise was Mom.

John died in 1994. He lived alone for the last eight years of his life, after he and Louise had divorced for the second time, and his few possessions became mine to sort through. In a corner of the damp basement in his Rhode Island cottage, past the Sears Roebuck table saw, old fishing rods, and rusty clam rakes, sat three plastic boxes. I carried them upstairs.

We can’t know what John hoped for his pictures, what he would have included in a book—he seems to have never revisited his images. Perhaps they provided him with a way to hold on to what’s hard to forget but equally hard to remember, to fix the past in time and let it stay there.

The Extraordinary Ordinary presents us with traces of what John Baer saw—or more importantly, how he saw.

©John Baer, Paving Fifth Avenue

©John Baer, Couple, Washington Square Park

©John Baer, Nuns, Midtown

Yolanda Cuomo, Jonno Rattmann, and I (the Paper Cinema team) had the pleasure of going through the boxes at Andrew and Megan’s house in Rhode Island (where John once lived).

There were prints mounted on cardboard, strips cut from contact sheets, notebook pages with John’s handwriting, ID cards, a few letters. . . . Yolanda pulled objects, layering them, collaging them together, as a way to open each chapter, and Jonno set up his camera to make those images.

When we got to a shoebox full of silhouettes, Megan and I immediately began arranging them into pairs and groups. There were hundreds of them. Baer had transformed pictures of boxers, skaters at Rockefeller Plaza, baseball players in Central Park, pedestrians and bicyclists, into an animated imaginary of still(ed) and distilled actions.

©Alexa Dilworth

I think it’s safe to say that I became obsessed by the ways in which John Baer’s eyes, and hands, had gravitated toward abstraction. As I continued to arrange and rearrange the silhouettes, Andrew and Megan asked me if I would consider writing an essay about them for the book. I readily agreed, and the resulting piece, “Finding the Shape in the Form,” is excerpted throughout this post.

The book begins at the beginning, with John Baer’s first photographs, and ends with the last pictures he made as a photographer of serious intent. It’s hard to resist the urge to cast back to where and when John Baer acquired his Leica. Baer was witness to worlds unmade and rebuilt, realities broken and repaired. The Leica seems instrumental to Baer becoming—to his moving from disorder to process, continuity, and self-invention. We talk about photographers using their cameras to extend their vision, but in John’s case, did the camera unlock something in him, a sensibility that required the right mechanism to turn it?

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer, Soldiers on a French Train

The more I studied John Baer’s photographs, the more interested I became in their genesis, in Baer having come into possession of his German camera from a German soldier at the end of the war. The Leica traveled with Baer, a first lieutenant, as the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion crossed occupied Germany to Wetzlar, where they were headquartered by early September 1945.

John Baer had witnessed and experienced a great deal by the time he arrived in Wetzlar—including the liberation of a concentration camp. I can’t help but wonder how the camera might have acted as both barrier and access point and provided him with a mediated way of seeing, and being: an aperture through which to find and create order.

So many American soldiers wanted souvenirs, cigars and booze, Nazi flags and Lugers. That John Baer claimed a Leica as a means of interacting with others and the world— a mechanism for a different kind of capturing and shooting—is significant. I was struck by the idea of the camera as souvenir, by the word’s connotations of seeing again and remembering, and by this book being a “memoir,” an object that performs the act of remembering on John’s behalf.

©John Baer, Louise Twice

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer, O!Kay Bar, Montpellier, France

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer, Passing Time, Bryant Park

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©John Baer Archive, The Extraordinary Ordinary

©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 silhouettes, however, stretch those fractions of seconds into an ever-expanding articulation of the present tense. They become—are made and remade—over and over again. Print after print, image upon image, Baer collects and accumulates a set of objects that contain within them time and history and memory—a record of change and adaptation, of use and user.

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. What fascinates is Baer’s dedication to extending his vision with such energy and concentration. 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.

Taken together, the silhouettes are an index of likenesses: the body in motion, at play, alone or with others. Sometimes they travel with their context, the photographs from which they’ve been separated, but often not. These shapes speak the language of the body, all posture and gesture, cadence and intonation: they pedal and push off, sway and strut, tilt and twirl, to their own music in their own time.

©Alexa Dilworth

©John Baer, silhouette

The boxes hold so many remarkable images, of worlds seen, felt, framed by John Baer. The memoir performs a reconstructive process that opens up possibilities in a way befitting Baer’s owns experiments and obsessions. These are not the moments he experienced and shaped but their likenesses; they offer only a loose interpretation of his intentions. John never saw or experienced his images in this way. The pictures seen here, in this order, offer only one strand of remembering: there are so many possible futures for the past.

This book itself is a souvenir, a memorial and monument to a life in time—a work of discovery and contemplation, ordinary and extraordinary by turn. The shutter clicks as the clock ticks, instant following instant, and the photographs and their particulars accumulate in drifts: the hole in a glove, the wristwatch a man wears as he walks past a bench in Bryant Park, the laces of a woman’s sandal.

These objects were layered in stacks, in boxes—creased and torn, marked by holes and cuts, signs of purpose and the work of chance. The book takes a form, establishes a design that it also undoes: the pages are continuous, shifting, overlapping, simultaneous. We can go forward, and we can turn back. John Baer’s photographs are shapes that are ineffable and unexplainable. They refer as much to what’s beyond the limit of the frame as to what exists within it, in the brightest light, the deepest shadow. Only through this series of pictures, read in—or out of—sequence, can we begin to find a way to enter a story that is being written even as we read it.

©John Baer, Winter coats and gloves

Jon Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary (275 duotones/248 pages printed in Italy, $65) is available for purchase from the John Baer Archive. The book comes in its own box, for you to open.

The John Baer Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing John Baer’s photographs through books, exhibitions, performances, digital media, and more. This book is just one of many possible expressions of John’s work. We invite artists, teachers, curators, and entrepreneurs to bring John’s photographs to life in ways we can’t yet imagine. johnbaerarchive.com / @johnbaerarchive

Paper Cinema Editions, a design, editorial, and production collaborative, is established on the belief that photography books should be sources of lasting truth, beauty, and inspiration. Founded by creative director Yolanda Cuomo with editor Alexa Dilworth and photo reproduction master Jonno Rattman, Paper Cinema’s ambition is to devise something original for each project with innovative design and construction rooted in its content. A book, like a great musical score, film, or building, should be everlasting. @yolandacuomodesign