At age 12, Baker was shown how to develop black and white film by his father, an artist and teacher. The process captivated him. Throughout his teenage years, he journaled his interests in geography, geology and weather by "collecting" photographs on his daily walks in the New England woods and along the coast.
While majoring in Meteorology as an undergraduate, he realized his core interest was photography. He began taking photography classes and later attended graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design where he studied with Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and visiting faculty Minor White and Lisette Model. In 1975, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography.
Later, as a tenured faculty member at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas/Dallas, Baker taught photography and courses exploring the relationship of the visual arts to the humanities. During that time, he co-curated exhibitions and presented symposia on photography, most notably, Photography: The Selected Image,that showcased the work and methods of Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Arnold Newman, Gary Winogrand, Ray Metzger and Laura Gilpin. The exhibition toured museums nationally (1976-78) including the Minnesota Institute of Art and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
In 1986, Baker became the Photography Program Director at Anderson Ranch Arts Center near Aspen, Colorado, where for the next decade, he invited hundreds of renowned photographers to teach and participate in workshops. These artists included: Frederic Sommer: Mark Klett; Ralph Gibson; Linda Connor; John Sexton; Sally Mann; John Szarkowski; Stephen Shore; Judy Dater; Mike and Doug Starn, and Mary Ellen Mark. He later became the organization's Executive Director.
At Anderson Ranch, surrounded by established artists who possessed the clarity and conviction needed to build their careers, Baker was inspired to develop portfolios of images and exhibit his work in galleries and museums. He received grants to pursue photographic projects and began to develop a collector base among individuals and institutions. At the same time, he continued to present exhibitions and symposia on environmental and photographic topics including the 1989 conference The Political Landscape with Richard Misrach that brought together photographers, historians, politicians, filmmakers and Native American leaders to explore the impact of cultures on the American Western landscape.
Later, Baker continued his career in art education and artist communities by serving as President of Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine and then as Executive Director of Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle, Washington. Throughout his career, Baker continued photographing the natural landscape, at first exploring New England and Canadian Maritime Provinces, and then traveling extensively to Mexico, across the Intermountain West and through the Canadian Rockies, and more recently, the Pacific Northwest. Using primarily a 4 x 5" field view camera, he worked with black and white negative film, and in the 1980's included color negative and transparency film.
Recently he has begun to use a digital camera. His printing methods have evolved through making silver, dye transfer, Type C and Cibachrome prints to more recently scanning his film images and making digital prints or working directly with digital camera files.
In addition to his photography, Jim has written extensively for regional and national publications, and from 1995 - 2006, his Colorado regional NPR program All About the Arts featured interviews with prominent artists, filmmakers, writers and poets.
Today Baker actively pursues his photography and writing while continuing to support and advise artists' communities.
Statement
When he began photographing, Baker thought of photography as a way of visually collecting experiences from his walks in nature. "Whatever caught my interest, I recorded, with no pretense about trying to express myself."
As he began his education, first informally by looking at anthologies of photography such as The Family of Man and This American Earth, and later through his formal undergraduate and graduate studies, his interest in how to use photography deepened.
"When I first saw Ansel Adams' Burnt Stump and New Grass, and Diane Arbus' Child with Toy Hand Grenade, I realized that photographs were more than simply documents - photographs could engage and inform us - personally, historically, culturally, politically and aesthetically."
He began to realize that the experience of taking a photograph and the experience of viewing the image were quite different. "The photographer Gary Winogrand once said, 'I photograph to see how something looks photographed.' When taking a picture, I learned to ask myself, 'What will this look like as a photograph?' and then used the camera as a tool to find out. I discovered I was more fascinated when I was driven by my curiosity than by an ambition to make a 'great' image'."
While initially he explored different directions in photography, Baker found his interest was consistently focused on the natural landscape. "I was influenced by many things I read and observed. The portrayal of landscape as backgrounds in paintings by Domenico Veneziano, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Claude Lorraine and Yves Tanguy, deeply influenced how I convey my own sense of the natural world - alternately raw, romantic, foreboding, affirming or surreal."
Baker has always felt an attraction to, and alienation from, the natural landscape. "Reading Joseph Conrad, particularly this passage from the Heart of Darkness, explained to me how I think about the natural world: "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth . . . you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once - somewhere - far away - in another existence perhaps . . . there were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” . . .
"My photographs are like Conrad's restless dreams showing me an overwhelming reality that can be silent and sentient, immediately in front of me and, also, quite distant from day-to-day life. They speak to my sense of oneness with and separation from, my attraction to and apprehension of the natural landscape."