A GI Got a Leica from a Captured Soldier and Spent a Decade Photographing Post-WWII World Rebuilding

John Baer didn’t set out to be a photographer at first. In 1945, while serving with the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, he acquired a Leica from a captured German soldier. His first frames were of fellow soldiers, worn down by the war they’d just fought. But as time moved on, his motives became those moments slowly bringing joy back to everyday life.

John’s Leica stayed with him for the next nine years, according to the John Baer Archive, the nonprofit now overseeing his work. He photographed his way through a Europe still shaking off occupation and a New York City riding a postwar high. But then, he packed the whole body of work into boxes and walked away from it.

Sadly, he never picked photography back up. John Baer spent the rest of his career as a public relations writer. He eventually started his own firm, and the negatives sat untouched until after his death in 1994. His son Andrew found three bins holding roughly 4,000 negatives, prints, and contact sheets. They stayed largely unopened for another 27 years, moving house to house with Andrew. In 2021, he and his wife Megan Moynihan began scanning them.

John’s photos are those of a self-taught photographer, but with impeccable talent for the unguarded moment: office workers on their lunch break in Bryant Park, boys playing with wooden guns in Franco’s Spain, skaters at Rockefeller Center, Germans hauling building materials by horse cart through cities still being rebuilt. His photos capture an epoch and serve as both historic records and artwork.

It’s a shelving-and-rediscovery story that photography folks will recognize. Vivian Maier’s negatives surfaced the same way, bought at a Chicago storage auction years after she stopped shooting. You may also know the story of Masha Ivashintsova, a Leningrad photographer whose daughter found 30,000 of her negatives in an attic. It was work Masha had never showed to a single person in her lifetime. Baer’s case is a little different: he wasn’t hiding from recognition; he simply moved on. But there definitely is the same pattern of a serious body of work sitting in the dark for decades, waiting on someone else to develop it.

John Baer, The Monograph

The collection of John Baer’s photos is now out as a monograph. The John Baer Archive published John Baer, The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Memoir in Photographs, 1945-1954, with design by Paper Cinema Editions and an essay by Alexa Dilworth. We bring you a few more photos of this talented photographer below, and you can get the 248-page hardcover book for $65 on the Archive’s website.

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