Morley Baer

Morley Baer died on November 9, 1995, in Monterey, California. His photographic archive was divided between personal work and architectural work. Film negatives that Baer felt represented his most significant work were given to the Special Collections of the University of California, Santa Cruz. His architecture photography archive, comprising mostly photographs of Stanford University buildings commissioned by the University or its architects, are housed at Stanford University. All his other archives, containing numerous entries, are itemized in the Online Archive of California.

Karman also touched on Baer's love of teaching. In addition to the formal institutions, in late Fall 1984, Baer created his own Annual Master Photographers Invitational Photographic workshops. He mailed invitations to selected students, scouted the venues, organized accommodations, and selected his preferred restaurants. He and his photographic assistant eagerly participated with the students, with Baer speculating on how he was viewing his subject and how he'd eventually create a printable negative. Afterwards, he hosted workshop students in his Carmel Valley home for his legendary English bangers BBQ. Afterwards, he leafed through his current portfolio, commenting on it and answering students' questions. Frances, hovering in the background, sometimes joined the group, obviously enjoying the sessions.

Recalling his grandfather's accounts of his yearly journeys from Ohio to California, Morley was enamored by visions of California's golden hills and sea-swept coasts. So, when he read the poetic descriptions of the western lands by the early 20th writer, Mary Austin, he conceived the idea of matching some particularly lucid passages from her book, The Land of Little Rain, with some of his more appropriate photographs. Result was the 1979 book, Room and Time Enough. He teamed with Augusta Fink, the biographer of Mary Austin, to produce a synergistic combination of prose and photography into a paean to the Western landscape.

In 1972, after the couple became temporarily estranged, the Baers sold the Greenwood Common house. Frances remained as an art teacher in the Bay Area. In 1979 they sold the Garrapata house, and Morley briefly moved to a smaller home in Carmel. In 1980, Baer was awarded the Rome Prize in Design and a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, where he mainly photographed the fountains of Rome. Baer had an exhibition, appropriately titled "The Fountains of Rome", in May 1981 at the Bonnafont Gallery in San Francisco. He returned to his Carmel home/studio after the year in Rome, and reunited with Frances. The couple then bought a house/studio on Carmel Valley Road in 1985, where they lived the remainder of their lives.

Baer learned basic commercial photography in Chicago and honed his skills as a World War II United States Navy combat photographer. Returning to civilian life, over the next few years he developed into "one of the foremost architectural photographers in the world," receiving important commissions from premier architects in post-war Central California. In the early 1970s, influenced by a friendship with Edward Weston, Baer began to concentrate on his personal landscape art photography. During the last decades of the 20th century, he also became a sought-after instructor in various colleges and workshops teaching the art of landscape photography.

With Garrapata as his base, Baer photographed throughout the West but mostly in Central California. He exhibited his landscape portfolios of classical black-and-white photographs, wrote or contributed to several books of photography, and became an instructor in photography workshops. In the early 1970s, Baer joined Adams and other prominent central California fine art photographers to found the Friends of Photography in Carmel, which organized yearly photographic student workshops at Carmel's Sunset Center and at the Julia Morgan-designed Asilomar Conference Grounds. Those workshops inspired development of what became known as the West Coast style of landscape photography through the last decades of the 20th century. He published two photography collections in 1973, 'Andalucia' and 'Garrapata Rock'.

The success of Not Man Apart led to a later assignment as the principal photographer for the 1968 publication, Here Today. Subsequently he was selected as the only photographer for the 1978 book Painted Ladies, a collection of color photographs of the more stately San Francisco Victorian houses, Baer's first major color photography project.

In 1966 the American Institute of Architects gave Baer their Architectural Photography Award.

In 1965 the Baers built a second home and studio, designed by Bay Area Modernist architect William Wurster, south of Carmel near the Big Sur coast with dramatic shore and ocean views. Wurster designed the two-story house with its river-stone facade, creating an organic building blending with the surrounding rocks and cliffs, and sometimes referred to as 'The Stone House.' It commanded a striking view of Garrapata Beach and Soberanes Point with its long stretches of surf and beach. Unfortunately, Frances never felt comfortable in the Stone House, feeling it cold, damp, and isolated and continued to live in Berkeley while Morley used the Garrapata residence as his combination home and studio. The remote coastal location brought Baer into intimate contact with the primal natural elements of wind, water, light, and rocks at the cliffs and beach, an environment in which he did much of his best work.

When he returned to California, SOM hired Baer for a large photographic survey that lasted through the mid-1960s. During this time Baer also was the architectural photographer for the pioneering Sea Ranch, California in Gualala. He contributed work for the 1965 Sierra Club publication Not Man Apart, which also included entries from artists such as Robinson Jeffers, Dorothea Lange, and Beaumont Newhall. Jeffers exerted a strong influence on Baer's subsequent thinking and artistic sensitivities. In fact, Baer was so impressed by Jeffers that he began forming the idea of combining his photographs of the Sur coastline with Jeffers' somber but expansive poetry. Finally getting around to this project in his last years, it resulted in the book "Stones of the Sur", brilliantly curated by James Karman. The dynamic juxtaposition of photographs and poetry combined to reveal, in a mild paraphrasing of Karman, "much about the meaning and mystery of the world".

Through the influence of Nathaniel A. Owings, SOM hired Baer to photograph US consulate buildings being constructed throughout Western Europe. The Baers and their young son moved to Spain for two years. Baer found time to produce personal work by photographing out-of-the-way locations in Andalucia. The family traveled the country in a VW bus in which they camped as necessary, freeing them to go where they pleased. These photographs led to Baer's first one-man exhibition at San Francisco's M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1959 and his first published portfolio.

Morley and Frances became frequent visitors to Edward Weston's home/studio in Carmel's Wildcat Hill and with whom they had a close friendship until Weston's death in 1958. For the production of Weston's monumental photographic Portfolios I and II Morley worked closely with Edward's son Brett Weston in making the prints, while Frances did the spotting of the finished prints. Besides being helpful to Weston, this association greatly benefited Baer's career in the world of fine-art photography. Through Weston he met most of the prominent West Coast photographers. The more noted among them earlier had formed Group f/64 in San Francisco; its members included Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, and Henry Swift, among others.

Finding attractive work opportunities in the San Francisco area in the early fifties, the Baers sold their house on Carmelo Avenue in Carmel and re-located to Berkeley. Baer soon was making a name for himself as a leading architectural photographer performing portfolio work for architects and interior designers while freelancing for housing design magazines. Ansel Adams recruited him as an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, then under the direction of Minor White. When White left for the East Coast in 1953, Baer became Head of the Institute's Photography Department.

In 1953 the Baers moved into a 1920s era house in Greenwood Common that had been renovated by architect Rudolph Schindler for its owner, who sold it in 1951 to William Wurster, who, in turn, sold it in 1953 to Baer. Baer soon became very active in neighborhood affairs. Showing their lifetime appreciation for landscaping, the Baers hired Lawrence Halprin to design their outdoor areas.

Baer again met up with Steichen in 1950 when he and Frances made a trip to New York. Although Steichen carefully examined the photographic portfolio Baer showed him, he was less than enthralled by its subject matter – their photographic sensitivities were vastly different.

Although Baer had briefly fulfilled his long-held dream of meeting Edward Weston, they had met only briefly. So, through a Weston friend sometime in 1947, Baer learned of an Ansco view camera for sale, a camera he had previously used in Chicago and was very familiar with its capabilities. Able to buy it for the then princely sum of $90, it became the camera he most used for the rest of his life. Although he had others for some assignments, the Ansco was the instrument with which he made his most memorable photographs. It became almost an extension of his photographic seeing and visualization in his later fine art landscape work.

His duties included public relations, aircraft recon, editorial assignments, teaching, and combat photography from aircraft and carriers. Accompanied by a writer, Baer covered military operations in North Africa, southern France, Brazil, and the Caribbean Sea. In 1945 he was assigned to the operational Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, commanded by the photographer Edward Steichen. Working under a variety of terrain, sea, and weather conditions, ever changing light, and new environments in physically demanding activities, he made dozens of photographs a day, and perfected his technical and compositional photographic skills. When discharged from the Navy in 1946 he was a complete and confident professional photographer.

In 1945 Baer, now a civilian in San Francisco, met up again with Frances Manney, a young woman awaiting admission to Stanford University, who previously had hired Baer as her photography tutor during his brief time in Norfolk. The two married and investing their dwindling funds, established a commercial photography business in a small store-front studio in Carmel in 1946.

Although he returned to Chicago, he already had applied for Art Center School while in San Francisco but his plans were derailed by the onset of World War II. In 1941 he enlisted in the Navy almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor and went through the Navy photo school at Pensacola, where he learned to adjust to its stereotyped approach to producing photographs. Baer graduated, commissioned as an ensign, and was transferred to Norfolk for a series of stories on the Atlantic Theater of operations.

Along with two associates, Baer was sent on assignment to Colorado in 1939. He had seen an exhibition of Edward Weston's photographs at the Katherine Kuh Galleries in January of that year, and became enamored at the sparse elegance of Weston's black-and-white prints. He extended his trip west to California to meet Weston at his studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The two did not meet, but Baer made the most of the trip by visiting San Francisco, the Monterey Peninsula, and Carmel.

Morley Baer's parents encouraged him in an active outdoor life growing up in Toledo. He attended the University of Toledo in 1934 and later transferred to the University of Michigan from where he graduated in 1937 with a BA in English. Continuing on there, he earned an MA in Theater Arts in 1938. Baer soon found a dull but well-paying job in the advertising office of the Chicago department store Marshall Field's. Dissatisfied, he apprenticed as a low-paid menial assistant, at a greatly reduced salary, to a Michigan Avenue commercial photography company. He shortly was photographing in the field, and developing and printing photographs.

Morley Baer (April 5, 1916 – November 9, 1995), an American photographer and teacher, was born in Toledo, Ohio. Baer was head of the photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute, and known for his photographs of San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" Victorian houses, California buildings, landscape and seascapes.

Along with his increasing success as a fine art landscape photographer, Baer continued with assignments as a commercial architectural photographer for several architect clients primarily throughout the Monterey Peninsula. He was the sole photographer for the exhibition, California Design 1910 in late 1974 at the Pasadena Conference Center; one of his landscape photographs graces the cover.