A. Aubrey Bodine Exhibit
"Chesapeake Bay Perspectives"
August 8, 2008 - February 28, 2009

August 17, 2008

In photographic circles around the world, A. Aubrey Bodine was regarded as one of the finest pictorialists of the twentieth century. His pictures were exhibited in hundreds of prestigious shows, in scores of museums, and he won awards against top competition. His photographs were seen in the Sunday Sun, numerous books and magazines, on calendars, as murals, and as framed prints decorating homes.

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 design made of open curves and natural perspective.

Not the least of Bodine's artistic ability was his craftsmanship. He was always experimenting with his tools, but seldom made a mistake. Some of his best pictures were literally composed in the viewfinder of the camera. In other cases he worked on the negative with dyes and intensifiers, pencil marking, and even scraping to produce the effect he had in mind. He added clouds photographically, and made other even more elaborate manipulations. Bodine's rationale for all these technical alterations of the natural scene was simply that, like the painter, he worked from the model and selected those features which suited his sense of mood, proportion and design.

The picture was the thing, not the manner of arriving at it. He did not take a picture, he made a picture.

The Hampton History Museum is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit, "Chesapeake Bay Perspectives", an exhibit of images by A. Aubrey Bodine, pictorialist. The exhibit runs through February 28, 2009. For further information, please call 757-727-1610.