John Baeder

His interest in small towns across America began when he was young by photographing old cars and other relics with a Baby Brownie camera.

[1] While attending Auburn University in the late 1950s, he made frequent trips between Atlanta and Alabama, which drew his attention to rural landscapes and roadside diners.

In the late 1960s he also started collecting postcards of roadside America such as diners, gas stations, campsites, and motels.

He is a knowledgeable and deeply committed chronicler of that rapidly disappearing facet of American vernacular architecture that has played such a unique role in our social and cultural history.”[8] Vincent Scully, professor of the History of Art in Architecture and author, further comments on Baeder's visual style in his introduction to Diners, 1978, stating that his "paintings seem to me to differ from most of those of his brilliant Magic-Realist contemporaries in that they are gentle, lyrical, and deeply in love with their subjects.

Most of the painters of the contemporary Pop scene blow our minds with massive disjunctions, explosive changes of scale, and special kind of wink-less visual focus.