Untitled

My father, Joe Baron, was born on November 30, 1894, in Brooklyn, New York, and died at the age of 54, on October 14th, 1947, in Rockville Centre, New York. As an adult he was a teacher and school principal in the New York City public school system. One of his hobbies was photography, and as an amateur photographer he took thousands of pictures both at home and during his travels. He also photographed students and teachers at the schools where he taught. The picture at the right shows him in his office. Many years ago I digitized most of his photographs and will share them with you on this web site. You may use these pictures freely; I only ask that you give my father credit where credit is due.

I do not remember my father; I was only 5 years old when he died. Before I was born he traveled a lot during his summer vacations during the 1930s and 1940s. He met my mother in Moscow on one of his trips and fell in love with her. She was a tour guide with Intourist in Moscow. They were married on July 15, 1937, and she emigrated to this country in 1939. I will tell that story later. The self portrait that appears here shows Joe with his camera, a Leica IIIc, and we can deduce from that picture that any pictures he took with that camera must have been taken after 1940, the year Leica introduced that model. I inherited Joe's Leica IIIc and used it for many years! I do not know what camera or cameras he used prior to his Leica IIIc, but based on the pictures I will show you it may have been an earlier model Leica camera.

My sister, Ruth, took charge of Joe's photograph albums, his negatives and his film strips. She allowed me to digitize them, which I did between 2004 and 2005. I scanned all of of his photographs that were in the albums. I do not know what has become of the negatives or photograph albums. Joe made contact prints from most of his negatives from his travels, and I scanned each of those contact prints, a page at a time. Because the negatives were 35 mm, the contact prints are very small. In any case, I scanned or digitized all the pictures and negatives and edited many of them for contrast and noise. Using his organization, I will present his pictures in his groups. For each group of pictures I will create a photo album using Jalbum and link that album to the label below.

Joe made contact images that he numbered 1 trough 2143 and pasted them in an album. I do not know if he took these pictures on a single trip or on several trips. He did not date the pictures. I do not know if they were taken prior to 1940. It is sad when historical information is lost. I am making these pictures available so that anyone who is interested can see parts of the world as my father did. There is probably some historical significance to these pictures, and if nothing else one can see how prople on the other side of the world lived in the mid and early 1900s. I imagine that most of the people that appear in these pictures are dead, and probable many of the places do not look anything like they did back then. I hope you enjoy my father's pictures.

When navigating through these albums, you can left click on a thumbnail to see an enlargement of the picture. When viewing a large picture you can left click on the left third of the picture to move to the previous picture, you can left click on the right third of the picture to move to the next picture, and you can left click on the middle third of the picture to return to the thumbnails. There are also navigation buttions to the right of the title bar that have the same effects. The arrow to the extreme right of the title bar starts a slide show. Right clicking brings up menues of other options.