Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks and writer Carl Schoettler

Villa Julie student Joel Griffith provided his blues guitar at the opening.

Jed Kirschbaum chats with John Shields, Chesapeake chef and owner of "Gertrudes" at the BMA.

Villa Julie art department chair Florian Svitak talks with Jed Kirschbaum at the opening.

Although it is tempting, especially with more contemporary images to be concerned with the stories and want to know the "news" accompanying each picture, the viewer is encouraged explore the visual meaning of each individual picture. News stories change, develop, perhaps become rewritten into history or are forgotten but the art endures.

The Villa Julie Gallery is sincerely grateful to Kathleen Ewing for graciously lending the works from Bodine's estate, and to Jed Kirschbaum who reluctantly agreed to participate.

Thank you to John Dorsey and Janna Rice for their assistance, and to the Baltimore Sun for their cooperation.

A. Aubrey Bodine was regarded as one of the finest pictorialists of his time. In Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay region his name was the synonym for photographic excellence, and his photographs were to be seen in the Sunday Sun, in books, magazines, calendars and as murals. Bodine's photographs were a major influence in the popular culture of his native land.

Bodine's career began in 1923 when as an office boy at the Baltimore Sun, he submitted some photographs of the Thomas Viaduct at Relay (MD) to the editor of the Sunday paper. They were published. Soon after he was in the photographic department, and along with routine news assignments was making art photographs for publication of "the brown section," as people called the rotogravure supplement of the Sunday Sun.

In 1928 for the first time one of these pictures was given a by-line, and "Photo by Bodine" became a fixture.

From first to last Aubrey Bodine was a newspaperman covering all sorts of stories with his camera. This gave him opportunities to travel throughout the region and learn about it in every tide, wind, weather and season. Out of this experience came remarkable documentary pictures of farming, oystering, blacksmithing and dozens of other occupations, pilots of ships, country and city folk, and in short anything of interest.

Moreover, the documentary pictures are of the finest quality, artistic in design and lighting -- beyond the usual standard of newspaper work.

Bodine believed in photography as creative discipline. He studied principles of art at the Maryland Institute, and even started to paint. Meanwhile, he mastered techniques of developing, printing and preparing pictures for exhibition. The camera and dark room became tools to him like the painter's brush and sculptor's chisel.

Bodine's photographs offer different views of his artistic vision. His choices of subject-old times and things, the beauties of nature, man as worker, player and an individual. His work offered a glimpse of life, our lives, through his lens.

- Adapted from William Harvey Hunter of The Peale Museum

Jed Kirschbaum

Jed Kirschbaum knows that "everyone has a shield around them.... And nobody is going to let you past this shield if they think you're trying to steal something." He believes that the best images come when you can get past "that shield...especially in portraiture. You can look at a roll of film and almost see someone dropping it." Kirschbaum believes shooting "isn't just a matter of snapping a shutter. You're writing with light, and photographers have to build a vocabulary the same way that a writing reporter does."

Kirschbaum has vast experience shooting everything from flood, famine, war, presidents and kings, and everything in between. He has developed two cardinal rules: "You never steal a photograph, and always try and leave people their dignity."

Kirschbaum came to the business of photojournalism later than some. He grew up in Connecticut and moved to Baltimore, graduated from Johns Hopkins as an English major in 1971. He didn't own more than an Instamatic camera until his senior year.

After graduation he hitchhiked across Europe, acquired a better camera along the way. The off-hand comment from a film developer, "Nice stuff...ever consider doing this for a living?" may have inspired a career.

After serving in the Army he returned to Baltimore, began to take weekend photography classes at the Maryland Institute and eventually enrolled in the photojournalism program at University of Missouri. It was there he began to free lance at sports events that led to a position at a paper in Hoboken, New Jersey and for more than twenty-two years he has been on staff at The Baltimore Sun. "You get paid every day to go out and try to take a beautiful photograph. When the light is beautiful, and you have an interesting subject. Well..."

- Adapted from "You're Writing with Light" by Dan Fesperman