At the Vero Beach Museum of Art, an exhibition of color photographs in the Titleman Gallery will take you back.
“John Baeder’s American Roadside” features 23 prints of images shot in the 1970s by Baeder, an artist whose name has since become synonymous with photorealistic paintings of diners.
While the present exhibition includes a couple of images of the once ubiquitous purveyors of populist cuisine, the other images in the show celebrate a variety of uniquely American commercial structures, including specialty shops, motel cabins, billboard-covered businesses and assorted eateries.
For those of us of a certain age, the images will stir memories: the roadside attractions of childhood vacations, when we were backseat captives in the family car; the small-town haunts of our teen years; the rendezvous spots of our young adulthood.
Gazing around the gallery, Baeder notes, “Some of these photos were taken on Route 66, on a journey that (architect and friend) Robert Venturi sent me on in 1975 for a bicentennial exhibition at the Renwick Gallery.”
About half of the photos in the exhibition were taken in upstate New York and New Jersey; other photos were taken in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana and “probably” Rhode Island, Baeder says.
Geographically speaking, all of the works in the show live up to its title, save one.
Stopping before a picture of a little restaurant whose signage proclaims “Miss Berthier, R. R. Rondeau, Prop., Patates Frites” (1973) Baeder says, “I cheated there – that’s St Croix. Shhh – don’t tell anybody!”
Standouts in the show include a red, white and blue travel trailer parked under a lowering sky (Trailer, Rt. 66, 1975); a hubcap-encrusted shop (Evansville, IN, 1978) and a veritable collage of red and yellow signboards in a New York City parking lot (Crown Parking, 1977).
Raised in Atlanta and educated in art at Auburn University, Baeder made his living throughout the 1960s as an art director at prestigious advertising firms in Atlanta and New York City.
He used photography as a personal creative outlet at that time, notably documenting in black and white the streets of Atlanta’s south side in 1963, as bulldozers cut a swath through old, traditionally black neighborhoods for Interstate 75.
Baeder’s earliest photographs focused on the people who lived in those urban surroundings. Gradually, however, his documentarian’s eye turned to the environs themselves and the buildings and hand-lettered signs that remained from a time when generations of families lived in the same neighborhood, the corner store was locally owned, and downtown was the place where people worked and played.
Baeder’s visual interest in people and their environments started young.
“Glackens, Reginald Marsh, Sloan – when I was a kid I was drawn to those social realists. They talked to me. But you know, when we are kids, we don’t know how to process that. Inside ourselves, we know how to relate, but we don’t know how to articulate it as kids,” he says.
In 1972 Baeder left advertising and began his career as a painter, working from vintage photo postcards of diners, campgrounds and shops. These paintings attracted the attention of art dealer Ivan Karp, who first showed Baeder’s work in his SoHo gallery, O.K. Harris, in September of that year.
Baeder next turned to black-and-white photos – documentary views of shop-lined streets – of the 1930s and ’40s as inspiration for a series of paintings.
“I called up (WPA-era photographer) Russell Lee one day, just cold, and I said, ‘Would you mind if I did a painting from one of your pictures?’ He said, ‘I’d be honored,’ and I said to him that of all the WPA photographers, he and Ben Shan are my faves. I mean, so was Walker Evans, but Russell Lee and Ben Shan are my faves.”
It was from those images, Baeder says, that “I started painting realistically.”
“I was painting in black and white, and I was just so passionate about black and white, and I wasn’t painting from (my photos) yet. It was during that period that I changed over.”
By 1972 Baeder was already shooting 35 mm color photos of America’s architectural landscape; people, by that time, had largely left his photographs.
The photos in the current show are dated from 1973 to 1980; they are a selection from a group of images that were printed as an edition in 2008.
“When my dealer (Thomas Paul Fine Art) in Los Angeles decided to make the prints and frame them as a show, it was his idea, basically, to put them together and assemble a catalog,” Baeder says.
Don’t refer to the pictures in American Roadside as a “series,” at least not within Baeder’s hearing.
“I don’t know anything about a series,” he protests.
“When I was on the road I just shot pictures,” he says, adding that when he took them, he had no intention of printing the images and presenting them as art works. For Baeder they were nothing more than research material, akin to artist’s sketches, that he took on trips in search of his main quarry, diners.
Baeder’s demurrals aside, the photographs in American Roadshow are fully realized works of art. Thoughtfully selected for their aesthetic possibilities and carefully framed in the artist’s viewfinder, the photographs are governed by a not always obvious symmetry, and enlivened by a palette that owes its harmonies to the eye of the artist, rather than the luck of the draw.
Baeder’s camera of choice for these compositions was a Nikon F with a 50 mm macro lens (“Because it’s pure,” he says). His film was Kodachrome.
“Anybody remember that?” he asks, by way of a rhetorical question, to an audience at the museum gathered for his opening two weeks ago. A couple of the over-50 set in the crowd (this writer included) did.
The Kodachrome colors of Baeder’s photos give the lie to Paul Simon’s famous tune of 1973.
“The nice bright colors” of the song are rendered here as weathered pinks, blues and greens, there are rich, warm reds, and yellows that range from ochre to pale gold.
And while it appears to be summertime in some of the pictures, all the world is not a sunny day in Baeder’s world.
It can be argued, in fact, that Kodachrome was at its best in recording the long tonal ranges of a cloudy day, and Baeder’s subjects benefit from moody weather. Take, for instance, the overcast winter’s day in “Belleville Diner” (1977), where a flurry of snow stands out against the diner’s dull gray-and-white facade, or “’57 DeSoto, AZ (1976),” a formalist composition of mint green car, dusty pink wall and ominous, foliage-framed sky.
As fresh and real as the images look on the walls of the Titelman Gallery, Baeder says “a lot of these places don’t exist” anymore.
However, when our memories turn to dust, with any luck, John Baeder’s images will endure. That’s what art is for.
“John Baeder’s American Roadside” continues through May 15.