Baltimore's pictorial photojournalist A. Aubrey Bodine became world-renowned for images he created of Maryland, and Marylanders believed in the image of Maryland he created.
His photographs, taken over a half-century, portray a romanticized land of pleasant living, with vistas that stretch on forever into blue skies filled with sculptural clouds, where watermen and farmers bring forth bounteous harvests from the Chesapeake Bay and the fertile farmland of Western Maryland. His steelworkers seem almost heroic, feeding a Bessemer furnace at Sparrows Point, and his longshoremen on Baltimore's docks could be figures in an ancient Greek frieze.
He loved the rolling vistas of Garrett County and the skipjacks on the bay, foggy nights on Baltimore streets and the harbor lit by the moon, a barbershop in Fells Point and the Choptank River from the air, great Tidewater mansions and Highlandtown rowhouses with white marble steps.
"In Baltimore, people just loved Bodine's pictures," says Tom Beck, the chief curator of the Albin O. Kuhn Library at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a specialist in photography. "In a sense, it's as though he invented our cherished image of Maryland as he followed his own aesthetic approach to photography."
On the one hand, Beck says, Bodine was a photojournalist, working for a newspaper. "But on the other hand,' he says, "his imagery was largely invented. That is, he added clouds. He added mood. He altered and added effects to imagery. But this pictorial aesthetic was precisely what people adored him for."
The home for that aesthetic for more than five decades was The Sun, where Bodine worked from Aug. 29, 1920, to his death on Oct. 28, 1970. Now, a new edition of his photographs from those years, Bodine's Chesapeake Bay Country, selected by his daughter, Jennifer Bodine, has just been released by Tidewater Publishers. The new book offers a chance to revisit the vision of his home state that her father conjured up for generations of Marylanders.
For 43 years of his career, Bodine was a photographer for the Sunday Sun, including two decades working for the sepia-colored photogravure "brown section," and later for the Sun Magazine.
"To a Marylander," wrote the late Harold A. Williams, Bodine's editor at the magazine for 25 years, "the name Bodine conjured up a vision of a beautiful picture, and a beautiful picture of Maryland was instantly associated with Bodine. The byline `A. Aubrey Bodine,' with the possible exception of the byline `H. L. Mencken,' became the best-known in the history of The Sun."
