Jennifer B. Bodine was in her last semester at Roland Park Country School, struggling academically as graduation loomed. She realized that she probably should have kept her mouth shut.
This was the 1960s, when seniors there had a little-known tradition. Every spring, they chose a day to strip their school uniforms, set them ablaze in a trash can, and romp around, at times in their underwear, to celebrate impending freedom.
"Why I mentioned this [at home], I'll never know," she said last week, shaking her head.
She hoped that her father, the Baltimore photographic legend A. Aubrey Bodine, would forget, but that wouldn't have been like him. He arrived as the first dress began to smolder, took his shots, and motored off without saying a word. A picture -- with a coquettishly defiant Jennifer smack in the middle -- ran in The Sun on Sunday.
In spite of the newspaper photo, she graduated.
The man she still calls simply "Bodine" died in 1970, leaving his daughter the copyright to the roughly 50,000 photographs he made in his career, but she inherited more than his work.
The 59-year-old nonpracticing attorney sees herself, in many ways, as quite different from the father she describes as often distant and consumed by his craft. But in a recent dispute with the Baltimore Museum of Art over omission of his work from a new show on photography, she, like her dad, hasn't shied from expressing herself and defending his work quite forcefully.
"We're talking about folks with Ph.D.s from Ivy League institutions," she says of curators who failed to include any of her father's images in Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900-1960, a survey of major developments in photography during the first half of the 20th century. "Who says being educated means you can't make stupid decisions?"
Museum officials feel it's important that they maintain control over curatorial decisions. To Bodine, however, her father simply "belongs up there with the big boys," those who helped define the art form, from pictorialist Edward Stieglitz to photojournalist Dorothea Lange. She sent the BMA a series of stinging e-mails that, among other things, asked curators to her home to see more Bodines and reconsider; challenged the credentials of the exhibition's curator, Rena Hoisington, and forced the whole debate into a meeting of the Board of Trustees last month.
