Upon the photographer's death, the family lacked the time or the money to promote his work -- a benefit without which few photographic artists end up enjoying the sort of international stature Bodine and Orban, a photographer's son, say he merits.
In 2000, 35 regional retailers sold Bodine images; today, more than 270 do. The company has turned 180 Bodines into notecards (available on the Web site at $2.50 apiece) and sold more than 10,000 made-to-order prints (between $19.99 and $99.99 apiece).
During that time, according to Beck, the UMBC curator, an art-history community that once saw Bodine as a talented regional hero has begun reassessing his artistic stature. Last fall, Black and White, a fine photographic art magazine, ran a Bodine spread that proclaimed him a "pictorialist master." Bodines hang at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
For his version of Pictorialism -- a movement born in the 1880s that sought to infuse photography with "painterly" elements -- he used techniques that were as evocative as they were controversial within journalism. He kept files of cloud and moon images, for example, often adding them to realistic landscapes for dramatic effect. Some questioned the method.
"I have as much right to do that as a writer does to use adjectives," he once said.
For Jennifer, becoming custodian of his legacy has sparked memories. As a kid, she thought the Farmer's Almanac in the family kitchen was for her benefit to know the weather for school; Bodine, rather, hung it up and used it to forecast light and tidal conditions. Her father, she says, suffered constant headaches and always had brown-stained hands and fingernails -- signs, she is sure, of chronic chemical poisoning.
A man she says rarely had the time to speak with her is, in a way, doing so now. "Not in a looney-tunes way," she says. "But more and more, I feel him guiding me."
Last winter, friends of Bodine who keep tabs on local exhibitions told her of planning for Looking Through the Lens. She left a phone message for curator Hoisington, asking whether her father would be included. When no return call came, Bodine sent a follow-up e-mail posing the same question. The reply didn't please her.
"In my father's day and age," she says of the man who often got the city to move light poles to accommodate his work, excluding "Bodine would have been unthinkable."
