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.