After the war John and his wife Louise settled in New York City, rented an apartment in the East Village and connected with a community of artists and writers. In 1950 they went to France and spent the next year living in Montpellier and traveling throughout Europe.  John’s photographs capture a world struggling to understand itself following years of war and political realignment.

In 1951 John and Louise returned to New York.  John walked the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn taking photographs that captured the post-war optimism of New York City. He exhibited his photographs at the Abingdon Square Painters gallery.

In the mid 1950s, after ten years of honing his eye and his craft, John Baer stowed it all away.  Boxes of negatives, contact sheets, and gelatin silver prints, meticulous notes about printing, were packed up and left almost totally untouched for decades. Only John knew all of what those boxes contained, and perhaps even he’d forgotten much of it.  Making future plans for the work wasn’t something he concerned himself with. Their fate he left to chance.