Karl Baden's photographs have been widely exhibited, including at the Robert Mann Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery, and Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Howard Yezerski Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art, DeCordova Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Musée Batut, France; Photokina, Cologne, Germany; and The Photographers Gallery, London. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Kenan Foundation, and Light Work Visual Studies. His photographs and visual books are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Addison Gallery of American Art; Polaroid International Collection; and the Guggenheim Museum Library. He has taught at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design, Clark University, and Phillips Academy at Andover; and has been on the faculty at Boston College since 1989.

Among other photographic projects, Baden has made a photograph of his face every day since February 23rd, 1987. In 2000, he was the subject of a 26-year retrospective exhibition at Light Work Visual Studies. “How did I... Get Here?”; a 48-page catalogue, accompanies the exhibition.

Beginning in 2000, Baden began assembling a collection of non-photographic volumes (primarily fiction and poetry) that have important photographs or images by important photographers as cover illustrations. The purpose of this ongoing collection is to explore the relationship between book cover design and the history of photography, particularly regarding the photographic cover as metaphor for book content, and the influence of photographic history on popular culture. This collection has evolved into the award-winning website and database CoveringPhotography.com, hosted by Boston College, where anyone may access these covers via photographer, author, publisher, publication date, and designer. In the Fall of 2008 Baden curated the exhibition Covering Photography: Imitation, Influence… and Coincidence in the Rare Books Room of the Boston Public Library. This exhibition is currently on display in the Special Collections Library at Syracuse University.