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Bafford, a friend of Bodine’s from the early
Twenties when both were active in the Baltimore Camera Club, judged many
shows with him. Though they had similar styles in photography they often
differed violently in their viewpoints. They would get into slam-bang
arguments that are still talked about at the club. Looking back on those
days, Bafford calls Bodine a good judge. “He always gave experimental
photographers points, whether they succeeded or not. He said you had to
encourage them or you’d never have progress. He and I once arranged
for a controversial salon at the Baltimore Museum of Art with three
artists judging it. There were about 2,000 prints and they only selected
about 75. Exhibitors raised hell for years.
“As a judge he seldom mentioned a print’s
good qualities, but he always commented on its bad ones. He felt that
was the way to help people, but it wasn’t always appreciated. He didn’t
like cats, dogs, babies, tabletops, or anything sentimental. He never
liked nudes and didn’t think there was any excuse for them. I think he
made only two in his life.”
Bodine was honored with a number of one-man
shows. In addition to his first in Hagerstown in 1933, as noted earlier,
they included: the Peale Museum, Baltimore, 1944; the Eastman Exhibition
Hall, Rochester, N.Y., 1948; two at the Smithsonian Institution, 1951
and 1958 ( fourteen of his pictures are in its History of Photography
collection); the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Va.; and two at the
Baltimore Museum of Art, one in 1954 and the other immediately following
his death in 1970. Most of the prints in the latter were sold before the
show ended, even though there had been no plans or efforts to do this.
In 1965 Bodine had a show in Moscow that was the first exchange of
one-man photographic exhibits between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
The latter was represented by Vladimir Shakhovskoi, the “dean” of
Russian photographers. This exchange was arranged by Frank B.
Christopher, a former Baltimorean now living in Falls Church, Va., who
has conducted a one-man campaign to use the medium of photography to
create better understanding in the world. He was also instrumental in
having a set of 64 of Bodine’s prints exhibited in many other
countries.
Bodine was a charter member of the National
Press Photographers’ Association, which was founded in 1945, and for
many years was active on a national and local level. He told national
headquarters that he had “cornered, badgered and conjured [sic] every
photographer in Baltimore into joining.” On the national level he was
a leader in raising professional standards and attempting to improve the
image of the news photographer. He was on the photo contest committee
that developed the “Pictures of the Year” contest, the largest of
its kind in the world.
In the 1950’s when the Encyclopaedia
Britannica co-sponsored that competition, Bodine won many major awards
and innumerable secondary ones, usually for the best pictures in feature
and pictorial classes. He won twelve sets of the 24-volume Encyclopaedia
Britannica, four or five sets of the Junior Encyclopaedia and the
two-volume Britannica World Language Dictionary, and five or six copies
of the Encyclopaedia World Atlas. When Life printed his picture for
winning this amazing number of reference books he received hundreds of
letters asking for a free set. He was unable to oblige because he had
only one set left. He had given the rest away as soon as he got them to
schools and friends.
He was named a Fellow of the National Press
Photographers’ Association in 1953, thus becoming the first man to
have a Fellowship in both it and the Photographic Society of America.
The former’s top award was “Newspaper
Photographer of the Year.” It was one honor Bodine never achieved and
he wanted it badly. He coveted it even more after it was won in 1953 by
a colleague, Hans Marx, a superb photographer and print maker. Bodine
felt that he was at a disadvantage in the national competition because
that was based on points scored in a number of categories. While he did
well in “magazine picture story,” “magazine features,” “pictorial,”
and even, occasionally, “sports,” he never could enter suitable
pictures for “spot news” or “general news.” .As a Sunday
magazine photographer he did not have an opportunity to cover spot news.
Besides, he did not have the knack or temperament to do so. He was at
his best setting up his tripod and view camera when the time, lighting
and circumstances were all of his own determining. He was not usually
too effective when he had to shoot fast and under rapidly changing
conditions.
Every year he entered as many pictures as he
could in that NPPA competition. In 1957 he scored the most points. But
it was announced, “the judges felt a distinction had to be made
between a photographer covering assignments for Sunday use, like Bodine,
and one covering also daily spot news events. The man with the best
overall representation in the latter was George Smallsreed, Jr., of the
Columbus Dispatch, who was named `Newspaper Photographer of the Year.’
“ Bodine was designated “Newspaper Magazine Photographer of the
Year.”
To say that this decision disappointed and
angered him is putting it mildly and politely. He fired off telegrams to
the NPPA, to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and to the judges. He said
that since there was a qualification in his title there should be one in
Smallsreed’s too. He demanded that the other winner be termed “Photographer
of the year - General Assignments.” The judges would not listen. He
was informed by telegram, “The decision of the judges specifically
termed your award newspaper magazine photographer of the year and
Smallsreed’s title newspaper photographer of the year. Plaque must be
as described .in this telegram since that is how the judges decreed it.”
That did not stop Bodine. From then on he
referred to himself in his press releases and biographical material as
“Newspaper Photographer of the Year.” And that is the way he has the
citation read in Who’s Who.
In the middle Fifties he lost interest in
American exhibitions and began entering more foreign salons, in which he
had shown sporadically since 1947. He was disenchanted with the type of
photography becoming more popular in America and he disliked the
five-man jury system which was being used more frequently. Probably he
was also looking for new worlds to conquer, and in foreign competition
he could submit the prints that had been so successful in America.
Before he began entering foreign competition he
wrote John R. Hogan, of Philadelphia, “There are a number of questions
I would like to ask as you are better qualified to answer them than
anyone I know. At the same time, it seems selfish to ask these things
and not give others the benefit. So, how about doing an article in PSA
as a service to the Pictorial Division? In short I would like to exhibit
abroad. What is the order of procedure? Some say send a dollar-does that
mean a dollar bill or a dollar of their money-How can one do this
easily-draft, money order or check?-How best to ship-declarations,
customs, etc.? You once told me not to mount on account of dampness. Can
a 16 by 20 print be rolled and accepted, or mailed flat? Time lapse in
transit, also types of pictures, depth of print or whatever else you
think would help.”
He sent to exhibitions in such cities as
Barcelona, Bucharest, Delhi, Ghent, Karachi, Singapore, Sydney and
Queensland, Australia, Vienna and Zagreb, Yugoslavia. He won major
awards in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil,
Czechoslovakia, Canada, Cuba, England, Finland, France, Hong Kong,
Holland, Hungary, India, Luxemburg, Malaya, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland,
Portugal, Republic of China, the Republic of South Africa, Romania, the
Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. But in the early 60’s he
began to lose interest in these salons too. Because of failing health
and the time needed to produce his newest book, “The Face of Virginia,”
he sent out his last salon prints in the middle Sixties.
Stanley L. Cahn, a Baltimore advertising man
who had been a friend of Bodine’s for years and a purchaser of his
pictures for advertising and promotional purposes, conceived the idea of
bringing out Bodine pictures in book form. To produce the first volume
Bodine & Associates was formed in 1951. In addition to Cahn and
Bodine, the incorporators were George Rowan, who dropped out a few years
later, and J. Albert Caldwell, founder of Universal Lithographers, Inc.,
of Baltimore. Cahn dummied up a book, titled it “My Maryland,” and
showed it to Albert D. Hutzler, president of Hutzler’s, who was so
enthusiastic that he placed an immediate order for 500 copies. That
enabled Cahn to get favorable responses from other large book outlets in
Baltimore. “My Maryland” contained 174 pictures that Bodine said he
selected from an estimated 25,000 negatives. The book went on sale in
September, 1952, and by November 1 that entire edition of 2,500 had been
sold. It had four printings and has sold nearly 9,000 copies.
“Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater” was
published in 1954 and has become Bodine’s most popular book. It has
had five printings and two revised editions, selling more than 22,000
copies. The national lithographers’ trade association picked “My
Maryland” in 1952 as the best lithographed book of the year; “Chesapeake
Bay and Tidewater” won that award in 1954. These and subsequent books
were printed in Unitone, a printing technique developed by Caldwell and
his staff. Fine screen halftones are over-printed in such a way as to
give an extra dimension to the pictures.
A third picture book was “The Face of
Maryland,” published in 1961. It has had five printings and two
revised editions, selling 12,000 copies. Finally, “The Face of
Virginia” was published in 1963 and has sold 9,000 copies.
Two other Bodine productions were “A Guide to
Baltimore and Annapolis,” 1957, with text by the author of this
biography and “Baltimore Today,” 1969, another guide book with text
by James F. Waesche.
Bodine wrote an introduction for each of his
four picture books. He told how some of the photographs were made, named
favorite places in the Bay country and revealed a little, but not much,
about himself: He thought automobiles in the foreground of the State
Office Building would spoil the view, so he waited until the Fourth of
July to make it. For many years he had been unable to shoot rolling
fields filled with cornshocks; he felt it took about 20 acres of shocks
for a scenic picture and in recent times farmers were reluctant to shock
that much because of the labor involved. Otwell was his choice of all
Colonial homes in Maryland, Dorchester was the most interesting and
scenic of the Eastern Shore counties, Frederick his favorite city in
Maryland, Fredericksburg his favorite in Virginia. One of the
pleasantest assignments he ever had was a one-week trip aboard the
four-master Doris Hamlin to Newport News. In “My Maryland” he wrote,
“Some of the big events of my life took place on Tilghman Island when,
as a boy, I visited my uncle, Dr. Scott Kennedy Wilson; once he took me
to St. Michaels and purchased for me my first pair of long pants.”
In “Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater” he began
adding his initials and those of family and friends in odd spots on
photographs before the engravings were made. The initials are hidden on
barrels, fences, wharves, barns, bridges, boats. He never told anyone
about them, wanting sharp-eyed readers to discover them and wonder what
they meant. It became a private game among his friends to see how many
they could find. He claimed that not half were discovered; then he
admitted he could not remember where he had put most of them.
This whimsicality first attracted public
attention when he was lecturing before the Rehoboth Art League in
Delaware. When he asked if there were any questions, Avery Ellis, of
Georgetown, stood up. “I’ve got one,” he said. “How did the
initials R.Q.Y. and R.P.H. get on the side of my rowboat, which you
pictured on page 69 of `Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater’?” Blushing,
Bodine explained what he had done. The initials represented friends,
Richard Q. Yardley, the Sun cartoonist, and R. P. Harriss, a Baltimore
newspaperman.
What made Bodine the photographer he was? What
were the secrets of his darkroom? Admirers can praise but not explain.
Wilbur H. Hunter, director of the Peale Museum,
summed up in one sentence, “He was in absolute command of what he was
doing.” Bafford said that when taking pictures “he had the patience
of a saint.” Albert D. Safro, supplier of his equipment and materials,
described him as “probably the finest photographer who ever worked in
a darkroom. It was unbelievable what that man could do there.” A judge
wrote on a comment sheet about one of his pictures, “If I could make a
print like this I wouldn’t care whether photography was an art or not.”
Joseph Costa, a photographer for 51 years and for much of that time
involved on the national scene, declared, “Besides having the greatest
respect for Aubrey for his integrity, for having the courage of his
convictions, and for his fearlessness in speaking out whenever he felt
the need, I considered him certainly the finest print maker I have ever
known and the greatest photographic pictorialist of his time-if not
all-time greatest.”
His equipment, contrary to what many believed,
was not elaborate. His first camera was a 2 1/2 by 41/2 Kodak. In his
early newspaper days he had a 4 by 5 Speed Graflex with a Verito lens to
produce soft images. Then he went to a Kodak 5 by 7 view camera with
five different lenses, from a wide angle to a 12-inch Goerz Dagor; he
considered the six-inch Goerz the best lens for that camera. For some
work he carried a Speed Graphic, “which is a good example of what not
to build. It should have a revolving back, various swings and be lighter
in weight.” In the early 60’s he began using a Hasselblad for many
newspaper assignments. He found it adaptable and easy to carry - the
latter factor was important when illness began to sap his strength. His
favorite camera was a 5 by 7 Linhof. He used this for most pictorial
work; its large negative was ideal for the detailed retouching he did.
He kept the equipment in the back of his car
(the capacity of the trunk had a lot to do with the automobile he
bought). In addition to cameras and tripods, he also had a machete,
shovel, child’s white parasol, bee smoker, compass, toilet paper, and
galoshes and old shoes for swamp jobs. The machete and shovel were used
to cut down or remove anything from weeds to stout saplings that got in
the way of his camera angle. The parasol, spotted and stained, replaced
the usual flashgun reflector when he needed a softer light. The compass
helped figure future lighting when he was caught in strange territory
without sunlight. The bee smoker provided wisps of smoke to create mood
or hide a distracting element. Toilet paper was wrapped around flash
bulbs to get a diffused light.
Bodine had an intuitive sense of what to
photograph and, with his art training, knew how to crop his scene in his
viewfinder. I wrote in the foreword to “The Face of Maryland,” “I
think that what he leaves out of a picture is almost as important as
what he allows into it. If I come upon a view that I have first seen in
a Bodine picture, I am often disappointed. Actuality is seldom as
beautiful as Bodine’s portrayal.”
Patience was one of his great virtues. He was
known to wait three or four hours to catch the right light on an old
house. He went to Federal Hill 30 or 40 mornings attempting to make a
color shot of the Baltimore skyline before he even took the camera out
of the car. Bafford was with him when he drove to Braddock Heights, west
of Frederick, to photograph the Middletown Valley on a particular spring
morning. Just as he was about to take the picture the light failed.
Without a word he put camera and tripod back in the car and drove back
to Baltimore He waited another year to get just what he wanted.
His “one shot” technique was envied but not
often imitated. He might be far from home-the United States Military
Academy at West Point, for example-and he would take just one shot of a
vital subject, the superintendent of the Academy, in this particular
case. Public relations men would whisper nervously, “Don’t you think
you’d better shoot a couple more to be sure?” Bodine must have
relished such uneasiness. If the public relations men had been giving
him a hard time by suggesting what to shoot he would deflate them in
such circumstances by saying loud enough for everyone to hear, “All I
need is one of him.”
He used psychology to get his pictures. The
story of his brewery assignment has been told many times. He asked to
have the general manager show him around. The executive did, but was
puzzled because Bodine did not make a picture; in fact, did not have a
camera with him. “All the employees saw me with the big boss,”
Bodine said later. “That’s all that mattered. When I went back with
my camera they associated me with him and did everything I asked.”
That was a lot. He had them paint tanks white and move several hundred
empty barrels to heighten the effect of one picture.
Sometimes the psychology was employed subtly.
When it was easy to distinguish by the license tag letters and numbers
whether a car was registered in Baltimore or the counties, Bodine used
his influence to get county tags for his Baltimore-registered car. He
felt that country people would be more likely to help him if they
thought he was from the county rather than the city.
On a trip to Nova Scotia Robert V. George,
Bafford and Bodine were driving back to the hotel in a cloudburst. When
they passed a wharf where fishermen were docking their boat Bodine
shouted for the driver to stop. Bafford said it was a great scene but he
and George were content to shoot from inside the car to keep from
getting soaked. Not Bodine. Without taking time to pull on a raincoat he
set up his tripod and camera. By then the fishermen were out of the boat
and on the pier. Bodine motioned to them to go back; they responded by
putting thumb to nose and wiggling their fingers. He pulled a fistful of
dollars from his pocket and waved them, shouting, “Here’s money for
whisky to get warm.” The fishermen returned to the boat and Bodine got
his picture. He titled it “A Long Haul” and in 1952 it won the
Photographic Society of America’s “Grand Award for Monochromatic
Prints.”
His years of experience paid off in many ways.
Often when photographing individuals he had them stand tiptoe. People on
their toes, he said, always look alert. One of his favorite subjects was
the Amish because of their gentle nature and quaint clothes. He claimed
he could identify Amish farmhouses by checking telephone and electric
wires: If none ran into the property he was pretty sure it was Amish
because this sect rejects modern conveniences. He had a sharp eye for
detail. When shooting the interior of an old mill in October for the
Christmas issue of the Sun Magazine he alertly tore the October and
November pages off the wall calendar so the picture would not be dated
that way.
Sometimes he sought to improve his pictures in
questionable ways. When photographing Civil War battlefields for his
books he loaded his car with muskets and stood these against stone walls
or in stacked position on the fields, giving a false sense of
verisimilitude. Occasionally he would throw one of his broken wagon
wheels on a battlefield road to provide a focal point. Eight pictures in
the Civil War section of “The Face of Virginia” have been adorned
with rifles or wheels; the musket in Ball’s Bluff cemetery is not easy
to spot even though it is incongruously placed.
After Mencken’s death he secured permission
from the estate to make a photographic record of the house just as it
was when the Sage of Hollins Street lived there. In photographing
Mencken’s bedroom he took several pictures from one wall to hang over
the bed. I was with him and I told him he should not do that, for both
personal and historical reasons. He went right on hammering nails to
hang the pictures while he answered me, “Who in the hell wants to look
at a blank wall over the bed?”
He preferred early morning light and would get
up at 4 o’clock to get it. Asked at a camera club meeting what his
favorite piece of equipment was, he cracked, “An alarm clock! You can’t
make pictures in bed.” He got special effects by aiming his camera at
the early morning sun. He felt that on a hazy morning with the sun just
over the horizon it was possible to shoot into it without ruining the
picture with glare. He also got silhouettes and water reflections that
way.
He went out at night, particularly if it was
snowing or raining. Writing to Hoxie, editor of Minicam Photography, he
maintained, “Only an experienced photographer would know how to make a
decent night picture, and get the lines straight, exposure correct,
sufficient imagination to make it on a rainy night, and likewise protect
his camera from the rain, and be skillful enough to watch the automobile
traffic, especially from side streets. This [speaking of the picture in
question] involved opening and closing the shutter perhaps several
hundred times. It required painstaking skill and imagination. One member
of the club showed his ignorance by saying the picture was out of
registration. It was not out of registration but during the long period
of time in making the exposure naturally the trees moved from time to
time.”
Sun photographers stamp their names on back of
their pictures for identification and credit. Bodine stamped his name
only on those prints which he felt had artistic or lasting value. He did
not want his name associated with the routine pictures he made.
In his nearly 50 years as a photographer, he
said, there were just four pictures he regretted not making. Three were
of incidents he spotted while he was speeding by to some assignment. The
first involved two cows separated by a barbed wire fence. Each had its
head through the fence, grazing on the other side. On a rainy day he
passed a roadside picnic table where a family was enjoying its outing
despite the weather; each person had a sandwich in one hand, an umbrella
in the other. The third was a motel scene late one morning. Only one car
was left on the huge parking lot. Its bumper was tied with tin cans and
bore a sign “Just Married.” Bodine said he would have titled that
shot “High Noon.”
The fourth picture he regretted not making
involved Albert Einstein. He was at Princeton doing a story on Robert
Oppenheimer when Einstein walked in wearing a stocking cap. Bodine asked
permission to make his picture but Einstein shyly declined. Bodine did
not press his request. And that would have been the last picture made of
the great theoretical physicist. He died four hours later.
Bodine mentioned only one picture that he was
sorry he did make. Early in his career he was in Elkton getting pictures
of a marriage mill. He sneaked a shot of two young couples who had come
from Pennsylvania for a double wedding. The girls were upset about
having their picture unexpectedly taken for a newspaper and refused to
go through with the wedding. With the bridegrooms fit to kill him,
Bodine yanked the unexposed film from the opposite side of the holder
and gave it to one of the four. The ceremony proceeded; the boys got
their brides and the photographer his picture. He told the story in
several interviews during the 40’s as an example of his ingenuity and
quick thinking. But not long before he died he retold the story to
Malcolm Allen. And then he saw it in a different perspective. “They
were real young poor kids from some goddamned tobacco factory who
probably didn’t know what they were doing,” he recalled. “If I
hadn’t given them that phony film they probably wouldn’t have gotten
married then. I may have wrecked four lives by being smart alecky and
selfish.”
There are many theories and educated guesses at
to what Bodine did in his darkroom, but no one is really sure because he
never revealed his secrets. Everyone agrees, though, that what he did
there was far beyond the capabilities of even outstanding technicians.
He had taught himself by imaginative experimenting, and much that he did
was unorthodox. Most photographers take about six minutes to develop
film; Bodine often took 10, 15 or 20 minutes. Then he used a reducing
agent to get the negative he wanted. He developed by inspection, picking
the negatives out of the developer from time to time to examine them
under safe light; his fingers were permanently stained brown from being
in the developer so much. He mixed his chemicals much as a good cook
mixes a cake, not by following directions on the box but by intuition
that came from years of experience. Chemicals recommended by the
manufacturer for certain conditions he used in other ways. Photographic
paper is dated and carries a warning against use after its expiration
date. Bodine deliberately saved paper until it became outdated,
maintaining that it had a more stable base then and produced better
exhibition prints. Yet despite his own wizardry he often called upon the
Eastman Kodak research department or experts at the Rochester Institute
of Technology for help with technical problems.
He was a master of processing and knew how to
get better shadow detail than anyone else. He preferred low-key prints
that retained all the detail in the shadow areas. An ideal print to him
was “one in which there is a perfect range of tones, from pitch black
areas among the darker shadows, through the middle tones, to the
highlights, which should have detail.” He disliked massive areas of
highlights because he felt they reproduced in chalky whites and were
therefore uninteresting.
He was a master of gold toning which, by the
use of gold chloride, gives a blue tint to a print. Bafford thinks he
did this better than anyone else. He was also a master of improving his
pictures by dubbing in elements, particularly clouds; he accumulated
hundreds of cloud negatives to draw upon. Probably on of his first
attempts at dubbing was made in 1942 on a print titled “At Dusk”
that he entered in a Los Angeles salon. He had botched the job and a
judge noted on the back of the entry, “ ‘At Dusk’ the clouds don’t
show in front of the masts at Los Angeles.” The print was found in his
personal effects with a note attached, “Save - important.”
He was not often caught in his dubbing. But one
subscriber wrote to the Sun Magazine in 1968, “Unless my trifocals are
in need of adjustment weren’t the clouds dubbed in on the Petersville
picture? The shadows on the church and tombstones indicate the sun was
over the left shoulder of the photographer. The reflections and rays of
the sun in the clouds indicate the sun was behind the clouds.” Bodine
was wary of discussing his cloud dubbing, but when questioned about it
during one lecture, he said defensively, “I think I have as much right
to do that as a writer has to use adjectives.”
His correspondence in the Forties contains
references to plans for writing a book on the gum bichromate coating
process “after I have a few more of the difficulties worked out.” He
predicted that “some of the ideas I have will be as revolutionary or
as advanced as Panchromatic film was to the old wet process that was
developed around the time of gum bichromate.” The book was never
written.
Bodine contributed articles to camera magazines
on such subjects as double printing, landscape photography, and the
future of color (this was in the early Forties) and he lectured
extensively to camera clubs throughout the East. (One man who invited
him to talk in Philadelphia several times wrote me, “He was the best
photographer in America, and near its worst speaker.”) But neither in
his writings nor in his lectures - in which he preferred to show his
pictures - did he reveal his hard-learned darkroom secrets. He never
even told them to colleagues on the Sun.
Richard Stacks, a magazine photographer from
1955 to 1969, said, “When someone discovered I worked with Bodine they’d
say something like, ‘Boy, are you lucky, you have a chance to learn
from one of the best.’ I’d just smile. I was too embarrassed to
admit that Aubrey never volunteered one thing. It was the same with the
other magazine photographers. If we’d ask him a technical question he’d
mumble an excuse and walk away. But if he wanted information, say about
color, or indoor lighting - his weaker points - he’d come around to
pump us. The only way to find out something from him was to wait until
he asked a question and then try to work the conversation around to your
problem. But you had to be careful. If he suspected what you were doing
he’d snap, ‘You’re just like those goddamned Eastman Kodak
salesmen’ and walk away.”
But his colleagues, William L. Mender, Ellis
Malashuk and Paul Hutchins, unquestionably benefited from their
association and were inspired by his dedication and craftsmanship. Their
technical abilities and the print quality of their pictures reflect his
influence.
Bodine was a pictorialist in the romantic
tradition. The essence of a photograph of his is its clarity and air of
tranquility. Except for an occasional storm scene, his pictures are
enchantingly beautiful because of their serenity. Somehow, in that magic
moment when he snapped the shutter, he eliminated whatever would spoil
the mood or mar the scene.
A surprising number of his pictures were devoid
of people. Often when people did appear they were used incidentally for
scale, to suggest motion or to fill a void. Though he made some
remarkable portraits he was never at his best, or even at ease, with
people. But let him pick his own time and place - a morning mist rising
from a meadow, a lonely cove at dusk; then he captured mood and beauty
in a way that was uniquely his. A Bodine picture was easy to recognize,
even in a salon with hundreds of prints many of which imitated his
style. He had his own way of dramatizing patterns, of detailing
textures, of controlling light and shadow to communicate beauty. He made
the viewer, even the insensitive one, see the scene much as he did and,
more importantly, respond to it.
I asked Stanislav Rembski, an artist who had
known Bodine for 25 years and had painted his portrait, to discuss
Bodine’s artistic qualities. He began by referring to “Conversations
with Goethe” by Eckermann and told a story from that book about a
Rubens landscape that had light on cattle coming from the left and light
on trees coming from the right. “Rubens did that for artistic effect,”
Rembski said. “So did Bodine when he added clouds. They were both
artists, not recorders of nature.” Several times he referred to the
photographer’s artistic humility in keeping himself out of his
pictures. “You forgot in a Bodine photograph,” he declared, “that
this was the work of a strongly feeling person.” He did not think of
Bodine as a romanticist, but as a classicist. He believed that Bodine
had an idealistic love of his country and of Maryland. “There is an
epic quality about his work for that reason. You can’t mistake a
picture of his; it has its own style. His choice of material showed an
astounding breadth. There was an amazing sense of color in his black and
white pictures, which always seemed to achieve the right tonality. You
looked at his pictures and were impressed, yet you did not think of them
as highbrow. Bodine intuitively knew what the average man seemed to
envision. There is a quality of folk art about his work.”
Wilbur Hunter, an authority on architecture,
was impressed with Bodine’s architectural photography. “He
appreciated a building for what it was. He not only showed everything of
importance, but he evoked mood. That’s not easy to do.”
John Dorsey, of the Sunday Sun staff, offered
this analysis of his work, “Aubrey Bodine’s vision of the world,
which speaks so strongly through his photographs, often seemed a
simplistic one. He seemed to see the world, and the people and things in
it, from a rather narrow point of view, to make up his mind quickly and
rarely to change it. He disliked the Freudian view of man or the
delicacies in a political argument as much as he disliked unnecessary
ornamentation in the landscapes he photographed.
“Such an attitude certainly can be found in
the stark clarity of his photographs, in which all things superfluous
are eliminated. Let others show snow scenes of airy lightness with
gossamer threads of crystals adorning a drooping branch. Bodine showed a
black fence and a black tree against a flat white background. Simple and
bare, no shades and no compromise.
“But to see the picture only in those terms
is to see only the beginning of Bodine’s art. Look at it again from
the point of view of design, and you see that it is almost an abstract
composition. For Bodine saw the similarity between abstraction and
representationalism in the basic quality that all things have in common:
a chair, a person, a mountain, everything is made up of certain
shapes-the triangle, the circle, etc. - which in themselves are
abstract.
“Thus Bodine could take a random abstraction
on a wall, stick a broom next to it and make it look like a man sweeping
the street. Conversely, he could make a recognizable object appear
abstract: by making an extreme close-up of rocks at Gettysburg or of a
zebra he made of them compositions in black and white in which the line
and form are more important for their own sakes than as part of
something else to which we can give a name.
“Then, too, Bodine had a remarkable ability
to catch the essence of things. His tree and fence-as so many of his
snow scenes-make you feel cold by capturing the bleakness and barrenness
of winter. All the excitement and romance of the steam age of
railroading are in his picture of an engine spouting smoke in all
directions. The water in his bay pictures is wetter than the real thing.
“And there are even those pictures in which
the element of symbolism is present. The oysterman’s drooping hat
suggests the wearing life of its owner even better than his face. The
fence that zigzags up a country hill suggests the slower pace of country
life, where one has the time to meander and change directions now and
then. In Bodine’s hands a curiously gnarled tree trunk sitting in a
pothole at Great Falls became a prehistoric monster looming up out of a
cave, a reminder that the process of erosion which has created the falls
began many ages before there was any man around to see it and will no
doubt be going on when we have disappeared.
“In short I think there is to Aubrey’s art
a surface simplicity which hides a great many unsuspected depths-and I
think the same was probably true of Aubrey.”
In January, 1971, Modern Photography published
an appreciation of two important pictorialists, Bodine and William
Mortensen, the latter described as “one of photography’s enigmas.”
Ed Scully, the magazine’s technical editor, declared, “Bodine, the
master of reality sublimated in romantically pictorial images, seems to
be completely different from Mortensen. And on the surface, the two are
dissimilar . . .Each gave photography a new and exciting pictorial
insight. Neither accepted the f/64 school’s reality of crisp, but
often sterile, pictures. Neither settled comfortably into the then
accepted rut of fuzzy, soft-focused pseudo-romanticism. Both departed
from what was being done. Bodine used the charm of pictorialism to
sharpen his viewers’ feelings about his workaday world . . . Any
analysis of salon photography will show how deeply A. Aubrey Bodine made
his mark . . . Though overlooked in the three present histories of
photography, Bodine and Mortensen will one day be recognized as two
crucial influences in the American pictorial tradition.”
That recognition has not yet come to Bodine
from the makers of national reputations - the big magazines and book
publishers, the New York museums and galleries, and the New York
critics. They have either not discovered him or dismissed him because
his work was regional. After several unfortunate experiences with Life
and Look he ignored their inquiries. He did not need a New York
publishing house because he had his own. He never seemed interested in
courting the New York museums and critics.
Even without such recognition, Bodine
undoubtedly exceeded his own goals. He was acknowledged a truly great
photographer whose style influenced pictorial photography. He was not
only a photographer but an artist. He probably was the best recorder of
his time and place. And he became a legend in his own lifetime.
When Mrs. Harold Duane Jacobs traveled to
Bangalore, India, the first question asked of her was, “You’re from
Baltimore? Then you must know Aubrey Bodine!” A 13-year-old girl wrote
to the editor of the Sun in 1955 and referred to the Sunday Sun by
saying, “I especially enjoy A. Aubrey Bodine’s section of the paper.”
A trade publication put it this way, “One of Maryland’s best known
products, like its oysters and crab cakes, is the photography of A.
Aubrey Bodine.”
In the Forties the Sun published a news story
about a note found in a bottle floating in Middle River. The note read,
“I’m marooned on an island in Middle River. My ship sank. Call the
Sunpapers and Mr. Bodine. Or call my closest relatives.” It was signed
“Gary Kloch, Route 5, Chamberburg, Pa. CO3-3613.” It turned out to
be a prank. Gary said he had written the note at the instigation of an
older cousin. He explained, “Robert said that I should use Mr. Bodine’s
name because if I was going to be photographed I might as well have the
best photographer I could get.”
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