Photography After 1917

Analysis of a photography after 1917.

A. AUBREY BODINE.

"BUILDERS IN LINE". (1961)

Aubrey Bodine's photographic career began in 1923 when as an office boy with the Baltimore Sun he was a newspaperman covering all sorts of stories with his camera so this gave him opportunities to travel throughout the region and learn about it in every tide, wind, weather and season and out of this experience came amazing pictures of farming, oystering, hunting, soap boiling, blacksmithing, clock making, bricklaying and dozens of other occupations he a true American original, combined reportage with the creative eye of an artist. Bodine believed that photography could be a creative discipline, and he studied the principles of art, the camera and the dark room equipment were tools to him like the painter's brush or the sculptor's chisel. He was always experimenting with his tools, but hardly ever 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.

Bodine's work includes pictorialist images as well as "straight" story-telling photojournalism and are also creative works of great originality. From his photographs I choose the image named "Builders in Line", a a perfectly balanced image bathed in natural light. a captured moment of history that intrigue me, amaze me, and makes me want to discover the way he could get such a piece of art. It is a construction or a structure being built and he captured the moment in which two builders are walking trough and even though the image of them is far I can almost see their faces walking so tired like robots just doing their job. This high-gloss, high-contrast print reminds me like a typical day in a builder life. He made an amazing use of light and darkness

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