In 1923, as an office boy at the Baltimore Sun newspaper, A. Aubrey Bodine (1906-1970) walked into the office of the editor of the Sunday section, and handed him some photographs he had taken. They were immediately published, and his career as a photojournalist began. Sounds easy, no? Well, in a way it was. As a newspaperman, and as an artist Baltimore was his beat. Atget had Paris, Berenice Abbott had New York, and Bodine had Baltimore. He photographed everything that moved and everything that didn’t: its people, its architecture, its events, its industry, and those who worked in it… their faces, their muscles, their sweat, their burdens and their abilities.
Bodine loved photography, and all it could do, and more so, the way it could do it. He was a wizard in the darkroom, pushing the palette of photographic craft right to the edge. His photographs looked like the world, only more so… not so much exaggerated as expanded. Has the steel hull of a ship ever looked so illuminated and luscious, riding the oily-seeming waves of Baltimore harbor in a cold light at dawn? Richard Serra would love this hull. If you ever wondered what it would be like to be a merchantman living his life on the water, surrounded by ships, beaten by weather, and what richness there was to be found there, here it is.
These photographs show you the surface of things, and names them, that’s always been photography’s job. Bodine’s pictures show you what beating heart lies under that surface. And there is much more to Bodine’s work than just factories, merchant ships, and blast furnaces, although these are extraordinary all by themselves, but it is the faces and bodies of the workers performing their yeoman’s work that bring all these elements into the realm of the personal. The pride of sheer physical labor is easy enough to portray, and it runs throughout Bodine’s work, but look at the faces of the young Amish girls and see how beneath the sweetness of their youthful faces there is a kind of fierceness of spirit that speaks of the strength of their characters. Bodine’s photographs always show respect for their subjects.
Alan Klotz
Alan Klotz is the director of the eponymous gallery, in New York. He represents the photographer A. Aubrey Bodine.
