A. Aubrey Bodine's Legacy as a Pioneering Pictorialist Photographer Endures Through Extensive Online Archive

A. Aubrey Bodine (1906-1970) was regarded in photographic circles worldwide as one of the finest pictorialists of the twentieth century, with his pictures exhibited in hundreds of prestigious shows and scores of museums while winning awards against top competition. His photographic career began in 1923 covering stories for the Baltimore Sunday Sun, where he traveled throughout Maryland creating remarkable documentary pictures of numerous occupations and activities that far exceeded usual newspaper standards through artistic design and lighting effects.

Bodine submitted photographs to national and international salon competitions and consistently won top honors, believing that photography could be a creative discipline. He studied art principles at the Maryland Institute College of Art, treating the camera and darkroom equipment as tools similar to a painter's brush or sculptor's chisel. His artistic ability was matched by exceptional craftsmanship, as he constantly experimented with his tools—some of his best pictures were composed directly in the camera viewfinder, while others involved working on negatives with dyes, intensifiers, pencil markings, and even scraping to achieve desired effects.

The photographer employed elaborate manipulations including adding clouds photographically and making other technical alterations to natural scenes. Bodine's rationale for these modifications was that, like a painter working from a model, he selected features that suited his sense of mood, proportion, and design. He maintained that the picture itself was what mattered, not the manner of arriving at it—he didn't take pictures but made pictures, fundamentally changing how photography was perceived as an artistic medium.

More than 6,000 photographs spanning Bodine's 47-year career are available for viewing on the website https://www.aaubreybodine.com, where these images can be ordered as reprints and note cards. For those seeking deeper understanding of this remarkable artist, the full text of his biography A Legend In His Time, written shortly after his death by Harold A. Williams (Bodine's editor and closest friend), can be found on the website at https://www.aaubreybodine.com, preserving his legacy for future generations of photographers and art enthusiasts.