That’s a pretty impressive exhibit, “Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900-1960,” that opened Sunday at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Some of it looks like Photography’s Greatest Hits. Some of it feels as timely as journalism. And some of it leaves you wondering about a legendary Baltimore fellow named Aubrey Bodine, who’s not even there.

Thirty years ago, in “On Photography,” Susan Sontag wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” That’s the sense of the new BMA exhibit. You’re not only watching an art form crawl onto dry land, you’re glimpsing pieces of mankind’s journey across the ages, a kind of visual catalog of images the eye wanted to hold onto, but couldn’t, so the camera did.

Photographs put a hold on time. They remind us where we’ve been, and sometimes offer warning signals about the future. In the new exhibit, the first pieces you see are the city of Baltimore in its ruin: There’s a 1903 panoramic view of the Inner Harbor from Federal Hill, followed by a similar shot, a year later, of Calvert Street north of Lombard in the ashes of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

Both pictures were taken by John William Schaefer, whose family ran a turn-of-the-century commercial photography firm. Amid the ashes and the brutalized buildings, you can still see the Battle Monument and the remains of the Maryland Trust Company and the Continental Trust Company (now One Calvert Plaza), the two tallest buildings in town at the time. The landscape in the very heart of downtown looks like Berlin would look, 40 years later, after the American bombers had done their work.

This story continues below
Advertisement

But here’s the stunner. Within two years, Baltimore’s entire business district and waterfront area that were destroyed by the fire were rebuilt. Instant urban renewal! It makes you wonder about parts of modern Baltimore that were ruined decades ago and nobody at City Hall’s bothered to rebuild them since.

But the new exhibit only dwells on Baltimore for a moment.

This is a journey through photography’s history, and our own.

There’s Lewis Hine’s 1911 photo of a coal miner, slumped in exhaustion. He is 13 years old. The country’s going through its debate about child labor laws. A caption from that era, penned by the National Child Labor Committee, reads, “Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired by the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labor pictures will be records of the past.”

There’s the great tabloid photographer, Weegee (Arthur Fellig by actual name), who raced around the streets of 1940s New York, shooting society types, gangsters, oddballs, derelicts, people trying to escape the summer’s heat by sleeping on their fire escapes. It’s the stuff of routine life as it’s really lived.

And there’s Robert Capa, the great war photographer. The photo’s called “A Defender of China.” It appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1938. The “defender” is a soldier, 15 years old. Schoolchildren only a few years younger bid him goodbye as he leaves for the front where the Sino-Japanese fighting has begun. “By now,” Life said, “he may be dead.”

It’s a tribute to the power of photographs that, so many years later, we are still so deeply moved.

The BMA claims “a 70-year commitment” to photography and boasts about 3,000 photos in its collection. But we’re told that the 150 pictures now on display represent “the first large-scale photography exhibit of its kind” at the museum.

That makes the absence of Aubrey Bodine puzzling. For half a century, from the 1920s to the ‘70s, Bodine’s marvelous work captured Maryland’s dock workers and farmers, factories and railroad workers and life around the Chesapeake Bay. His work was honored around the world.

In January, his daughter, Jennifer Bodine, commenced a lengthy and rather spirited correspondence with BMA officials about her father’s exclusion from the exhibit. The BMA includes 19 Bodine photos among its collection.

But, said curator Rena Hoisington, none is included in the new exhibit because “choosing the final selection involved making hard choices. I stand by my final selection as the best possible one for this particular exhibition and am not inclined to alter it at this point.”

It’s too bad. The new exhibit’s nice. But Bodine had a special place in Maryland, and considering this is the BMA’s first “large-scale photography exhibit of its kind,” it would have been appropriate to include his work.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com