After briefly considering a career in journalism,
Morley Baer began his artistic career as a landscape and architectural
photographer. Growing up in the Midwest and vacationing on the
East Coast, California had always lured his imagination. After
seeing an Edward Weston exhibition in Chicago, Baer’s mind
was made up. He was California-bound to pursue both photography
and his new mentor, Edward Weston, whose work had conveyed an
unparalleled emotionally aesthetic impact.
A long war was raging and not long after Baer had arrived on the
California Central Coast, he found himself in the navy where he
continued to photograph. The years passed and Baer returned to
Carmel where Weston was still living and working. Baer offered
himself as an assistant, and although he was "the wrong gender"
for Weston’s hiring practices, they nonetheless became friends.
Baer continued to spend time with Weston, learning through osmosis
and rapidly falling under the spell of the California landscape
where he could be seen often wandering along roadsides in the
early morning with a large format camera earnestly making photographs.
The names Weston and Adams have long obscured the reputations
of others living in the same places and photographing in the same
landscape. Unlike Adams’ astounding images of the natural
landscape, Baer’s work does not elicit awe, but a kind of
intimate pleasure, evoking in many a sense of familiarity with
what may often be unknown land. Morley Baer represents a generation
of photographers whose aesthetic interest in the landscape was
inseparable from their love of the land itself.
