Bodine's Baltimore: 46 Years in the Life of a City

Bodine & Associates, 1973. Hardcover. Very Good. 11x8x0. Signed. Inscribed by author, Wilbur H. Hunter. Hardcover. Good binding and cover. Shelf wear. Moderate foxing. *Autographed by author.* <br> Aubrey Bodine's photographic career began in 1923 when, as an office boy with the Baltimore Sun newspaper he submitted photographs of the Thomas Viaduct at Relay to the editor of the Sunday paper, and they were published. From first to last Aubrey Bodine was a newspaperman covering all sorts of stories with his camera – news events, famous people, unusual places, and curious activities. This gave him opportunities to travel throughout the mid Atlantic region and learn about it in every tide, wind, weather, and season. Out of this experience came remarkable documentary pictures of farming, oystering, hunting, soap boiling, blacksmithing, clock making, bricklaying and dozens of other occupations, student nurses, Amish children, pilots of ships and planes, country folk and city folk, wood sheds and cathedrals, wagons and railroad engines, and, in short, anything of interest. His documentary pictures are of the finest quality, often artistic in design and lighting effects beyond the usual standard of newspaper work. But Bodine's talent ran deeper than this, and so did his ambition. He submitted photographs to national and international salon competitions and consistently won top honors. Bodine believed that photography could be a creative discipline, and he studied the principles of art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. The camera and the dark room equipment were tools to him like the painter's brush or the sculptor's chisel. Bodine was a romantic pictorialist and this shows in his choice of subjects: the old times and the old things, the beauties of nature, man as an individual, and similar ideas. The pictures are usually quiet in mood, partly because of the subdued tones and partly because of a low tension composition made of open curves and natural perspective.