The pictures that accompanied Mark Baker’s words

Mark Raphael Baker was renowned as a writer, teacher and an inspiring speaker but until now his photography has been largely unknown to the public.

That will change this week when the Jewish Museum of Australia stages The Things You Cannot See: Photography of Mark Raphael Baker.

Mark’s passion for photography began in childhood and nourished him creatively. As a university student he set up a dark room in his parents’ home. In the years that followed he shot tens of thousands of images.

Mark’s photos belong to the genre of street and documentary photography. Over decades and across continents he captured the themes universal to humanity that readers will recognise from his writing: memory, survival, grief, and hope.

Whether his subject was people, nature, cities or shantytowns, the Jewish or the wider world, Mark’s photography feels intimate. He was attuned to life’s fragments – its day-to-day-ness, excitement, beauty, horror, loneliness and connectedness. And always its magnificence, reassuring or dramatic. He was unreservedly open to life: ‘I am overwhelmed by how much I love this world’, he wrote in his final memoir A Season of Death before he died from pancreatic cancer in 2023.

Donning his camera and famous grin, Mark was able to penetrate through many of the visible and invisible barriers of the world, which allowed him to record and document its beauty and brokenness in their many forms. Whether travelling solo or in a group, he used his camera to discover people, to connect with them and the landscape around him.

His calling to be a teacher was central to Mark’s engagement with the world. By honouring it he opened young minds, encouraging them to think big and hard, and to be alive to the world by reflecting on the atrocities of the past while being hopeful about the future. He entered his personal reflections in a journal: ‘I’ve been teaching the same courses to a moving feast of fresh undergraduates for almost twenty-five years. Holocaust. Genocide. Arab-Israel conflict. Variations on the same theme: the failure to prevent…’. These complex and critical questions consumed and defined Mark. When he was the Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, he established what became transformative, intensive units through Monash University’s study abroad program. Previously, he had accompanied his children Gabriel, Sarah and Rachel on March of the Living trips to Poland and Israel where, with his brother Johnny, he was an educator for hundreds of Australian Jewish school children.

Mark often referred to the themes and sites to which he took students as ‘the things you cannot see’. It was as much about what they saw before them as what once stood and is no longer. There were three layers to Mark’s understanding of witnessing: what you can see before you, what you cannot see and a mixture of both the seen and unseen. He captured this insight, which revolutionised his teaching, through the lens of his camera.

Many of his images from Rwanda and South Africa reflect the connection between trauma and memory. He engaged up close with reconciliation and transitional justice. With his students he attended Gacaca trials in Rwanda. Many of the faces he photographed during visits to memorial sites are of people he befriended. He listened, held and told their stories.

In that same journal Mark described the experience of taking students to Auschwitz: ‘We hike through the topography of life in this place of death – mountainous landscapes of spoons, of suitcases, of hair displayed behind glass walls.’ Bearing witness to and shining a light on Holocaust survivors and grappling with the meaning of the Holocaust to the Jewish people and the world at large, was the foundation of his professional and much of his personal life. It was therefore natural that he extended the visual record to photographing Melbourne Holocaust survivors at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, in their homes, or on the March of the Living in Poland. In The Fiftieth Gate he wrote, ‘as a son and as a historian, I wanted to record my parents’ memories, while also giving expression to the wider context of murder that can be obscured by survivor narratives.’

His written and photographic witness to Jewish existence extended to the present. For Mark the present infused the past as surely as the past infused the present. He travelled to Israel with students and took them to the places ‘you can and cannot see’, from the perspective of Israelis and of Palestinians. In the light of his experiences he wrote in his journal, ‘…now it is up to us, in Israel and the Diaspora, to take responsibility for the empowerment of Jews in their state and ensure that we speak out for a politics that moves between the polarised discourse of power and powerlessness, might or surrender, of ultranationalism and worship of blood, land, and ourselves’.

Mark did not travel only to faraway places to photograph. Local was a big part of his identity. Community formed and shaped him. The suburb of St Kilda in Melbourne, in its different iterations, was always close to him, especially the familiarity of Carlisle Street and its transformation from Old World to New. Tailors, shopkeepers, butchers and commuters. Café life. Gentrification. The beach and Luna Park. Until his horizon closed in on him, he ran along the foreshore. The shrieks from Luna Park reminded him of his desire to be forever young. Energised by the adrenaline of the rollercoaster of life, he embraced and emulated the big smiling mouth through which fun-seekers entered.

Through his photography and his writing Mark explored ways of being in both the Jewish world, and the world beyond it. Mark’s photography is being exhibited and published for the first time. Edited by myself, together with Esther Justin, Miriam Kauppi and Carlo Oggioni In Love With the World: Photographs and Words pairs Mark’s photography with excerpts from his writing. Together they offer new perspectives on and deepen the themes that preoccupied Mark throughout his career and personal life.

The Things You Cannot See, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Judaica Collection, is showcasing a selection of Mark’s photography. The images will be auctioned from 31 March 6.30pm – 11 April 10.30pm 2025, funds to the Jewish Museum. Visit the auction here.

The book will be available at the Jewish Museum of Australia bookshop, and from 6 April 2025 at Readings Carlton and St Kilda and Avenue Bookstore Elsternwick and Albert Park.

Michelle Lesh was Mark Baker’s wife and editor of In Love With the World. This is an edited version of her Introduction.