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Green Mount, Infrared, Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, by A. Aubrey Bodine, c. 1950. Image ID: 03-024
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Stevedores (a.k.a. Longshoremen), by A. Aubrey Bodine, 1955. Image ID: 29-194. This photograph was accepted 46 times in Salon Competition. It won medals in Russia, Yugoslavia (twice) and Romania.
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Choptank Oyster Dredgers, by A. Aubrey Bodine, 1948. Image ID: 15-068. This photograph won a $5,000 first prize in the 1949 Popular Photography national contest, and was awarded medals in Canada, Sweden, South Africa, Hong Kong, France, the Philippines, Italy, Portugal, and all across the United States.
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Medium/Discipline: Photography
Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
Place of Death: Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland Affiliation: Born here, Depicts Maryland subjects, Active while in residence
Prominent Theme: Architecture; Chesapeake Bay; Cityscape; Historic Landmarks; Landscape; Maryland; People
Gender: Male
Race/Ethnicity: White
Biography: Born in Baltimore in 1906, A. Aubrey Bodine became a world-renowned photojournalist, a photographer in the pictorialist style, and one of the most important photographers in the history of Maryland and the region. His love for the diverse landscape of the state is evident through the wide range of subject matter that he featured in his work, including the people, natural beauty and landmarks of the region. Bodine was the second of four children born to Joel Goode Bodine and Louise Adele Wilson, people of modest means who were committed to education and engaged recreationally in music and painting respectively. He grew up in Baltimore and in Elkridge.
Bodine left school during the eight grade in 1920 at the age of 14 to work as an errand boy in the Circulation Department of the Baltimore Sun and to save his parents tuition money. His training in photography took place while on the job at the paper, though he frequently took photographs with a box camera as a hobby. Bodine worked his way up to commercial photographer in the advertising department. After his success in taking over temporarily in the stead of the paper's commercial photographer, Bodine became photographer for the Baltimore Sunday Sun for 43 years, from 1927 to 1970, the year he died. Over the course of his career, he gained a loyal audience among Sun subscribers. While Bodine's career from when he started to the early 1940s was focused on documenting traditional subjects for the newspaper, such as horse races and visits to the city by notable national and international figures, his individual aesthetic style was readily apparent. His signature subjects became the region and its people, from Eastern Shore oystermen, clammers, crabbers, muskrat trappers, chicken farmers, African-Americans picking strawberries and crabs and potato and tobacco farmers on the Eastern Shore to Garrett County Table Rock in Western Maryland seen from Negro Mountain where in the 1700s an African-American member of a military force was killed by Indians.
Scholar and gallery owner Kathleen Ewing's A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore Pictorialist explores Bodine's pictorial work. She notes that, in 1924, Bodine joined the Photographic Club of Baltimore, a club modeled after European photographic societies that were concerned with photography as an artistic, not scientific, medium (Ewing, p. 11-12). Such societies looked to art history and its significant styles and compositions as subject matter worthy of capturing in real life in photographs. His involvement in the society was an important influence on his work, which became imbued with a romantic, pictorialist sensibility (Ewing, p. 13) that was to become his signature style. Bodine was accepted and won awards in more than 800 juries photographic salons all over the world. Bodine took courses in photography throughout the 1930s. In The Face of Maryland, Bodine discusses his study of design at the Maryland Institute College of Art Evening School, saying that, "The tuition I paid the Institute was the best investment I ever made." He studied design three nights a week under Hughes Wilson, an Institute graduate who had won a European Traveling Scholarship in 1928. Bodine married Evelyn LeFevre, who had graduated from the Institute in 1927 with a degree in costume design and who taught the subject at the Institute. They were divorced in 1942. He married Nancy Tait Weaver in 1944.
Biographer Harold Williams writes that Bodine's favorite camera was a 5 x 7 Linhof view camera mounted on a tripod. Bodine also said that he preferred infra-red film for certain pictures depending on the composition of the photograph, as well as a wide-angle lens of 135 degrees if he was interested in creating a dramatic effect.
Bodine thoroughly documented Baltimore's buildings, historic homes and industry during his long tenure at the Sun. His work often focused on that of the Chesapeake Bay, its estuaries and harbors, ships and sails. In his most popular 1954 book Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater, Bodine expressed his passion for regional subject matter: "Photographing the United States was a big thrill, but I always get a bigger thrill when I make a picture of a fleet of dredge boats moving over an oyster bed on a beautiful autumn day. That's a sight I hope I can keep photographing for the next 25 years." In 1961, Bodine was the first American photographer to have a solo photograph exhibition in the U.S.S.R. since the 1917 revolution. Bodine also published seven books; two are guide books and the rest are books of his work and writings that have undergone a number of printings and revisions. All of his titles have sold more than 110,000 copies.
Bodine won countless national and international awards for his work, including one for a photograph of Green Mount Cemetery where prominent figures such as Johns Hopkins, Betsy Patterson and Enoch Pratt rest. Bodine's Chopank Oyster Dredgers won first prize, a $5,000 savings bond, among over 51,000 entries in the 1948 popular photography contest. Stevedores won silver medal at the first Moscow International Exhibition of Art Photography in 1961. Bodine's work has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and he donated large bodies of work to the Enoch Pratt Free Library, The Newport News Mariner S. Museum and the Peale Museum, which is no longer open; Bodine's negatives and photographs that were given to the Peale Museum were transferred to the Maryland Historical Society when the Peale Museum closed. Bodine freely gave photographs to organizations asking for them.
Aubrey Bodine's daughter Jennifer continues to keep his legacy alive by making images of her father's work as widely available as possible; Web users can find more than 4,000 of his images, digitally restored, at www.aaubreybodine.com. The full text of Harold Williams' biography of Bodine from his book, A Legend in His Time, can be accessed on this site at www.aaubreybodine.com/books/legend/default.htm.
Education/Training: St. Paul's School, Baltimore, Maryland; Industrial Boys' School, 1922 or 1923; YMCA, 1931-32; Winona School of Professional Photography (Winona Lake, Illinois), summer 1931 and 1934; Maryland Institute College of Art, 1932-33 and 1933-34.
Art-related Employment: photographer; photography instructor
Selected References: Bodine, A. Aubrey. Chesapeake Bay and the Tidewater. (Baltimore: Bodine & Associates), 1954.
Bodine, A. Aubrey. My Maryland. (Baltimore: Bodine and Associates, Inc.), 1952.
Bodine, A. Aubrey. The Face of Maryland. (Baltimore: Bodine and Associates, Inc.), 1961.
Ewing, Kathleen M.H. A. Aubrey Bodine, Baltimore Pictorialist, 1906-1970.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), c1985.
Williams, Harold. Bodine, A Legend in His Time. (Baltimore: Bodine & Associates, Inc.), 1971.
Other Publications: Bodine, A. Aubrey. The Face of Virginia. (Baltimore: Bodine and Associates, Inc.), 1963.
Bodine, A. Aubrey. A Guide to Baltimore and Annapolis. (Baltimore: Bodine and Associates, Inc.), 1957.
Bodine, A. Aubrey. Baltimore Today. (Baltimore: Bodine and Associates, Inc.), 1969.
Bodine, A. Aubrey. Bodine's Baltimore: Forty-six Years in the Life of a City. (Baltimore: Bodine and Associates, Inc.), 1963.
Single-Artist Exhibitions: Baltimore Camera Club, 1934
Multiple-Artist Exhibitions: "Eleanor Parke Custis & A. Aubrey Bodine: Two American Pictorialists," Robert Mann Gallery, New York City, November 1 to December 21 2002.
Awards: Medals at the Maryland Institute Fine Arts Alumni shows, 1936, 1937; Honorary Fellow of the Photographic Society of America "for his talent, accomplishments and encouraging influence on photography as art", 1965; Fellow, National Press Photographers' Association, 1953
Artist Web site: http://www.aaubreybodine.com
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