Capturing a Moment

By Cherie Louise Turner

There’s a black-and-white photo taken in 1953 of four women sitting on a bench in Manhattan’s Bryant Park. They’re probably work friends on a lunch break. The three on the left are intently focused on what’s being said by the woman furthest right. It’s a moment that’s ordinary and intimate, captured in an instant where everything lines up right: the composition, the lighting, the gestures, the facial expressions. All of it.

But long before this image could make it to us today, some 70 years later, it was envisioned by the man behind the lens, John Baer. A street photographer so adept at blending into his surroundings, he’d gone completely unnoticed by these otherwise engaged women on the bench. John fixed his 1938 Leica camera on them, picked his moment, and shot. Later, he would develop the film in a darkroom he fashioned in the bathroom of the apartment he shared with his wife, Louise Fuoss.

In order to capture this fleeting moment with such seemingly effortless precision Baer had likely scouted the lunchtime scene for days, maybe weeks, watching the ebb and flow of people, noticing the way the light fell at different times of day. This shot, so perfectly executed, is as much a moment as it is a thoughtfully created narrative.

Yes, it’s about these women on a bench, but it’s also about New York City.  And it says something about the photographer himself. His curiosity, his point of view, his dedication to craft, his patience, his ability to distill a complex situation into something beautiful and inviting.

This insider’s sliver of postwar life in New York City is one of thousands of photographs Baer shot. From the outset, Baer showed an instinctive knack for capturing people in unguarded moments, immersed in their lives, busy making their way through the day. John’s photography seems to come from a personal, inherent drive to explore and share how he saw the world. If a scene or subject captured John’s interest, he set to create a thoughtfully executed image. His genius lay in making these images as engaging to us—the distant viewer—as they must have been for him.