Excellent match: Bodine and Baltimore

The famous Sun photographer did not travel far to find rich subjects for his art

A. Aubrey Bodine's city was Baltimore, of course, and for more than 40 years he lugged around his large-format camera and wooden tripod at all hours of day and night to capture his hometown while it slept, as it stirred awake and yawned, as it flexed its muscles, as it smoked and heaved and flapped and soared. Mr. Bodine recorded steelworkers and shipbuilders, stevedores in the gray gauze of dawn; iron workers and riveters silhouetted against a still-uncluttered downtown skyline; lamplighters putting flame to gas over avenues and alleys; arabbers selling produce on streets lined with new-looking rowhouses.

Mr. Bodine's era as a photographer for The Baltimore Sun ran from the mid-1920s until his death in 1970. By the time he suffered a massive stroke in the darkroom of The Sun, he had snapped thousands of photographs and gained international acclaim as a pictorialist who had a magical way with toner. He was an artist, a perfectionist who never stopped working at his craft. He photographed everything — watermen on the Chesapeake, children at play, men and women at work; skyscrapers and churches, barns and barges, monuments and haystacks, a city square under snow, a farm in summer's scorching sun. There are touches of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth in Bodine's art. He could be as light and as corny as Norman Rockwell, as deep and as weighty as Winslow Homer.

The Baltimore Sun recently auctioned off thousands of Bodine prints from its archive. Now, Jennifer Bodine, the famous photographer's daughter, has come out with the second in a trilogy of Bodine collections. This book is entitled "Bodine's City" (Schiffer Publishing). It provides ample evidence of Mr. Bodine's prowess with a camera and his attachment to Baltimore. Why would he have taken those other job offers, including one from Life magazine, when he had such a rich subject to work with here?

"About a third of all Bodine's photographs were shot in Baltimore," says his daughter, "and many of those were taken within a short distance of his home or his darkroom at the Sun."

According to Ms. Bodine, her father had four modi operandi when it came to capturing in black-and-white the everyday life of his city:

•Sun assignments. He was a feature photographer whose work appeared regularly in the Sunday edition.

•Ride-by pictures. These were "the ones he saw on his way to somewhere else," says Ms. Bodine.

•Come-back-another-day pictures. "The images he saw while out on the road but would capture another day when conditions such as light and weather were to his liking."

•Walk-around pictures. "Bodine would wander around his neighborhood, typically late at night and in rain and snow, shooting whatever struck his fancy."

That last method seems to have produced fully half of the photographs in "Bodine's City," and some of the best. There's a look up a slushy alley lit by gas lamps in winter 1952. Here's a lamplighter in 1945, doing his job on the sidewalk in front of a house; above him, in an illuminated second-story window, a woman might be either adjusting the dial on her radio or pouring a drink; it's a bit mysterious. Here we go, along Park Avenue after a rain in 1948, then across Mount Vernon Square, all elegant and European in the midst of a snowstorm in 1933, then west along Fayette, being widened for automobile traffic in 1936.

Some of the photographs in "Bodine's City" are for-the-record shots of what were then new buildings in Baltimore, revealing — and not always effectively — Mr. Bodine's eye for the geometric in stone and shadow.

But his best work is in what he encountered around the next corner. He seemed to prefer the small and quiet moments: sleepy cargo ships berthed at night side-by-side in the Inner Harbor (30 years before Harborplace); a modest wreath in a rowhouse window on Tyson Street (1953); wives and children of inmates walking past the high stone walls of the Maryland Penitentiary on visitors' day (1928).

Mr. Bodine saw beauty, mystery and irony in Baltimore. Most of his photographs were taken within a four-mile radius of where he lived and worked. He was excellent at his craft, and he was excellent right here. He did not go elsewhere to prove himself — and Baltimore was better for it.

Dan Rodricks' column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. He is host of Midday on WYPR-FM, 88.1. His email is [e-mail].