My friend Jonathan Bayer, who has died aged 87, was both a noted photographer and a writer on photography. His work, like him, was droll, watchful and kind.
His gelatine silver print Arthur, Arthur (1956), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows a large praying mantis clinging to net curtains. Although it suggests the inevitable triumph of nature over man, the image’s mood is curious rather than fearful. So, too, with Jonathan’s later work – Trees and Pram in Park (circa 1977, part of the Government Art Collection), and the elegiac Thames landscapes in the book Eye on the Estuary (2000) are meditations on fading worlds.
Jonathan’s background shaped his eye. When I met him a decade ago over a board lunch at a London prison, Jonathan asked what I did in (his term) “real life”. I answered that I was writing a book on the Bauhaus, patiently explaining that it had been a German art school. His answer – “Yes, my father was at the Bauhaus” – took me aback, as did his gentle admission that that father had been Herbert Bayer, head of printing at the school and inventor of its celebrated typefaces.
Herbert was, in fact, Jonathan’s stepfather, having married his mother, Joella (nee Haweis), after she divorced Jonathan’s father, Julien Levy. Joella was the daughter of the poet and notorious bohemian Mina Loy; Julien was also of the avant-garde aristocracy. It was his New York gallery that had brought Paris to the US in the 1930s, in the form of Surrealists such as René Magritte and Max Ernst, drawn to the French capital. Jonathan spent his infancy dandled on their knees.
In 1946 the Bayers moved to Aspen, Colorado, taking the 10-year-old Jonathan with them. There he was sent to the progressive Fountain Valley school, where he studied alongside Matisse’s grandson. After that he went to Harvard, and then to a PhD in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. Finding life at the Washington office of the European Coal and Steel Community dull, he moved to London in 1972 to pursue a more congenial career as a photographer.
In 1987 Jonathan co-founded the cooperative London Independent Photography group. He also began to paint, showing at the Morley Gallery – sophisticated works with echoes of his stepfather’s Bauhaus friends Josef Albers and Paul Klee.
Paintings by these two also hung in his south London flat, where he entertained with the mid-Atlantic courtliness of one of the nicer characters from Henry James. Jonathan was a great laugher, and provoker of laughter; his lamb hotchpotch was memorable.
In 2013, he married his longtime partner, Miranda Townsend, who survives him.
