Capturing Baltimore in the Best Light: A. Aubrey Bodine Baltimore raised A. Aubrey Bodine was a pioneer in the field of photojournalism and considered a leader in the 20th century Pictorialist movement. Over the course of his 50 year career at The Baltimore Sun, the self-taught photographer developed a style that captured the essence of Baltimore’s working class and Maryland’s embodiment of the Chesapeake aesthetic.

Bodine’s daughter, Jennifer, is devoted to exposing viewers to her father’s important and large (over 4,000 pieces) body of work and will be on hand at an upcoming retrospective exhibition in the University of Baltimore Student Center Gallery. (See bi-line for details). I attended a lecture by Jennifer at Bodine’s latest Baltimore Museum of Industry exhibition and learned as much about the history of Baltimore’s development as I did about the photographer. Bodine had a knack for humanizing industrial scenes – to view his work is to meet the faces behind the city’s tremendous growth and to gain furthur appreciation for the effort that created Baltimore as we know it today.

Press Release

Born in Baltimore in 1906, Bodine began his career as a messenger at the Sunday Sun at age 14. He submitted artful photographs to his editor and became a feature photographer at 21, a position he held for the next 43 years. In 1928, "Thomas Viaduct at Relay" ran with a credit line for Bodine.

"That probably was the first, or one of the first, credit lines he ever received," wrote Harold A. Williams, author of Bodine: A Legend in His Time. "… From then on his byline appeared regularly and became one of the best known staff names in Sunpaper history."

In 1946 the Sun’s Sunday Magazine, widely known as "the Brown Section" so named for its sepia print, debuted. Bodine and the Brown Section were inextricably linked. He traveled throughout Maryland documenting people at work and play: farming, oystering, hunting, fishing, blacksmithing, clock making, baking; nurses, the Amish, watermen, ships, airplanes, woodsheds, cathedrals, wagons, animals, trains, homes, bridges—in short, almost everything of interest in the 20th century. These pictures were of the highest quality, artistic in design and lighting effects far beyond the usual standard of newspaper work.

Bodine built his reputation among the serious photographers of his day. He entered and won numerous competitions worldwide, receiving numerous awards and honors for his remarkable images. From first to last, Bodine considered himself a newspaperman, an attitude evident in all of his work. He did not "take" pictures, he "made" pictures.

Bodine died in 1970, after 50 years with The Sun. His photo

Labels: A Aubrey Bodine, Maryland, pictorialist

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