A. Aubrey Bodine, Photographer

The building where I work is 150+ years old, and the organization where I work is 211 years old. That means that there's a lot of history within these walls. Recently, a colleague brought some old photographs to my office and I started to research them. I thought they might be by Baltimore photographer, A. Aubrey Bodine (1906-1970).

I took pictures of the three prints and e-mailed them to Bodine's daughter, Jennifer,who is the keeper of the catalogue and copyrights for her father's work. In typical Baltimore fashion, she and I have several connections - same school, fathers who both were newspapermen, and her ex-husband!

Bodine's work was in black and white or sepia-tone. His work reflects the Baltimore and Maryland that doesn't exist anymore - skipjacks on the Chesapeake Bay, tobacco farms in Southern Maryland, and Baltimore in the mid-20th century.

As I was scrolling through the catalogue that Jennifer Bodine has put on-line, I have found Bodine's classic images of many of the places I've shot, including an elusive image of the Library at Ladew!

One of the signatures of Bodine's work is his framing of scenes with clouds and trees, both of which you can see in the images here.

Numerous books of his photographs have been published, and his work is in the permanent collections of some of the top museums in the country, including the Smithsonian and the George Eastman House.For more information and to see hundreds of Bodine's images, click here. All of the pictures here are from the site and copyrighted.By the way, Jennifer Bodine said the images we found at my office weren't by her father...