California Plain: Remembering Barns

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.