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.