The daughter of the late A. Aubrey Bodine, who became one of the country's best-known pictorial journalists during his 50-year career at The Sun, is protesting an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art that fails to include her father among photography's pioneering figures.
Jennifer B. Bodine, of Denton on the Eastern Shore, where the photographer snapped many of his most famous images, appealed to BMA trustees last week to overrule a curator's decision not to show her father's work, arguing that "Bodine has earned his rightful place alongside [Alfred] Stieglitz and other groundbreaking photographers who turned photography into an art form."
Museum officials don't dispute Bodine's importance -- the BMA has honored the artist with three solo exhibits -- but contend that works by other artists were a better fit for the historical scheme of the current show, Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900-1960. The exhibition surveys major developments in the medium during the first half of the 20th century.
"We rely on our curatorial staff with the appropriate training and experience to make these kinds of important artistic decisions," says BMA director Doreen Bolger. "Our job can't be to show the work of every artist, but rather to set a standard for this community, which has many wonderful artists in it."
The BMA owns 19 vintage prints by Bodine. In previous exhibitions devoted to the artist, it has drawn from both its own holdings and loans from other institutions.
In an interview this week, Jennifer Bodine said that while she appreciates the recognition the BMA accorded her father in the past, his exclusion from the current exhibition diminishes his stature as a major photographic pioneer.
"My point is he should be seen alongside the big guys," Jennifer Bodine says. "What the exhibit says is that Bodine was not a worthy pictorial photojournalist," she added. "That's what's kicked me the hardest, and this in his own hometown. Wasn't there one tiny spot that could have been made for him?"
Yet even partisans of Baltimore artists concede that Bodine, though extremely popular in his day, may not have been an innovator on the order of Stieglitz, Edward Weston or Ansel Adams.
"My sense is that the BMA show is about progressive work, and Bodine wasn't really viewed as a progressive," says Megan Hamilton, program director at the Creative Alliance and author of a history of the local arts scene. "On the other hand, I think the museum has been doing a lot with the local arts community recently."
