Two original photographs by legendary Chesapeake Bay photographer A. Aubrey Bodine will be auctioned Friday, June 18 to benefit the Horizons at Radcliffe Creek School summer enrichment program for low-income children. The live auction will take place aboard a paddlewheel dinner cruise out of Rock Hall as part of a fundraising event for the nonprofit. Potential buyers who are not able to attend the event can place sealed bids or bid through a proxy.
One of the photographs, titled “Foresail, Doris Hamlin,” dramatically captures the mast and sail of the schooner against the clouds as a crew member begins the long climb to the top of a rope ladder. Washington, D.C.-based gallery owner Kathleen Ewing, the leading authority on Bodine’s photographic career and a representative of his estate, was impressed by the quality and condition of the photograph, which she appraised at $5,000. The second photograph, “Oyster Tonger,” shows a lone man in a skiff tonging for oysters. Also in excellent condition, it is appraised at $4,000.
Bodine worked for the Baltimore Sun for more than 40 years and often took painterly photographs of men and women in the act of farming, oystering, soapmaking, hunting, blacksmithing and dozens of other activities. He moved from the news pages to the Sunday magazine section and increasingly pursued his photography as a creative discipline, constantly experimenting with new techniques and tools. Each print was hand-made by Bodine in his darkroom
As a Sun editor wrote of Bodine after his death in 1970, “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 did not take a picture, he made a picture.”
The two vintage photographs to be auctioned were donated by Anne Bordley Moss, whose physician father received them as a gift directly from Bodine in the 1950s. While chair of the Ear Nose and Throat Department at Johns Hopkins, Dr. John Bordley had treated Aubrey Bodine for serious sinus problems. Moss says she remembers how excited her father was about the photos that Bodine gave him as ‘grateful patient’ presents. “Daddy also loved the Eastern Shore and would be very happy to know that his photos will help enrich the lives of some of its children,” adds Moss, who was a very active board member of the Horizons program before moving to South Carolina several years ago.
Jennifer Bodine, who runs a web site devoted to her father’s work, says her father was “deeply appreciative of the care he received from his doctors, and he was very generous to people whom he respected. Dr. Bordley was at the top of that heap,” she adds. “My father would have given him only photographs that were special to him.”
The June 18th fundraiser aboard the paddlewheel Black-Eyed Susan also will include a silent auction of Chesapeake Bay treasures and adventures, including fishing trips, B&B stays and original art. Tickets at $125 a person include the three-hour cruise, dinner with wine, and music by Tom McHugh and the Bayside Ramblers.
For more information on the event and how to participate in the live auction of “Oyster Tonger” and “Foresail, Doris Hamlin” by sealed bid or proxy, call the Horizons office at 410-778-9903 or contact board president L.T. Goodall at 410-708-0042, [email protected].
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