California Plain: Remembering Barns

by Morley Baer

Overview

Widely acknowledged as the leading architectural photographer of Northern California, the late Morley Baer had an enduring passion for photographing barns, which he began doing in the 1950s. This book makes available fine-arts quality prints of sixty-eight extraordinary black-and-white photographs of California barns, those often ghostly but comforting shapes in a grassy pasture we glimpse as we fly down the freeway at seventy miles an hour.

The photographs also serve as a documentary record of a once common and now vanishing element of the landscape of California and the West. What is it about an old barn that wrenches a heartfelt pang from us today? Why do we photograph them, visualize them in their prime, and voice strenuous objections when new developments threaten to wipe them away? For many of us, abandoned farm structures are the focus of romantic reverie, an evocation of our agrarian roots, inviting us back to what we imagine must have been simpler, less complicated lives. A vision of life on the farm conjures a sense of wholesomeness and hard work, tillers of the soil taming the wild land as the American way of life moved West.

Enjoyment of the superb photographs will be deepened by Bright Eastman’s colorful discussion of the history and various roles and styles of barns, as well as by the description by Patrick Jablonski—Morley Baer’s last assistant—of how Baer took pictures, developed his negatives, and printed them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804742702
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	06/12/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	9.50(w) x 10.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Morley Baer's photographic books include Stones of the Sur: Poetry by Robinson Jeffers, Photographs by Morley Baer (Stanford, 2001); Light Years: The Photographs of Morley Baer; The Wilder Shore; Room and Time Enough: The Land of Mary Austin; Painted Ladies: San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians; and Adobes in the Sun.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Remembering Barns	1
	Morley Baer: A Personal Recollection	21
	The Plates	29
	Rules of the Road	101
	List of Plates and Negative Numbers	105

Editorial Reviews

" . . . [His] focus, among others, was the extraordinary nature of the most ordinary barns. Plain and simple. . . . Morley's most luminescent images reveal as much about the man as they do about the subjects, themselves."—The Monterey County Herald

"California Plain—Remembering Barns, a book of photography by the late Morley Baer of Carmel and edited by his widow, Frances Baer, is proof of why Morley Baer was known as his generation's premier architectural photographer of Northern California."—The Carmel Pine Cone

"Baer's lofty reputation as a photographer is amply justified by the images that are so handsomely displayed in California Plain."—L.A.Times.com

"[Baer] displays a command of both camera and subject that elevates his work from photo documentation to hight art."—L.A.Times.com

"These 65 fine-quality black-and-white photographs, dating from 1951 to 1994, reveal a true reverence for and love of rural architecture. . . . This is not just a regional book; it should be purchased for photography collections and wherever there are still farms and agrarian living or for readers who can appreciate simpler, less complicated lives. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"Something impelled Morley Baer to capture these soulful images from 1951 to 1994, riding the backwoods, with his equipment, coming over the hill, seeing the structure, driving about it, waiting (sometimes waiting hours) for a single exposure, to capture it at its most lonely and lovely best . . . .He was a professional, and he carefully shot, carefully developed, carefully marked these treasures, driven to record the history of our land, these glorious edifices out of the sould of America."—RALPH

From the Publisher

"Baer's lofty reputation as a photographer is amply justified by the images that are so handsomely displayed in California Plain."

L.A.Times.com

" . . . [His] focus, among others, was the extraordinary nature of the most ordinary barns. Plain and simple. . . . Morley's most luminescent images reveal as much about the man as they do about the subjects, themselves."

The Monterey County Herald

"California Plain—Remembering Barns, a book of photography by the late Morley Baer of Carmel and edited by his widow, Frances Baer, is proof of why Morley Baer was known as his generation's premier architectural photographer of Northern California."

The Carmel Pine Cone

"Something impelled Morley Baer to capture these soulful images from 1951 to 1994, riding the backwoods, with his equipment, coming over the hill, seeing the structure, driving about it, waiting (sometimes waiting hours) for a single exposure, to capture it at its most lonely and lovely best . . . .He was a professional, and he carefully shot, carefully developed, carefully marked these treasures, driven to record the history of our land, these glorious edifices out of the sould of America."

RALPH

These 68 b&w fine arts-quality prints of photographs of barns, taken from 1951-94, represent the late photographer's infatuation with this symbol of a vanishing way of life in the US West. Baer's widow introduces his career (1916-96) and the two essays accompanying this pictorial record. Scholar Bright Eastman's contribution provides historical and architectural context on the focus of Baer's photography. Patrick Jablonski, Baer's last assistant, offers a personal recollection of him. Includes a list of the plates and their negative numbers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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