It almost seems as if Jeff Holland can stand in the gallery of his museum for hours, just gazing at the pictures on its rugged walls.
It isn't that he has nothing better to do. As executive director of the Annapolis Maritime Museum in Eastport, he's responsible for finding funds, planning events, installing materials and in general keeping the museum about life in and around the Chesapeake moving "full steam ahead," as he puts it in the museum's latest pamphlet.
It's just that the black-and-white images on display by A. Aubrey Bodine, a longtime Baltimore Sun photographer, through the end of the month contain so much visual information that Holland feels a bit like the watermen his museum celebrates: The longer he looks, the more good stuff he hauls up.
"Look at this," Holland says, pausing to scrutinize "Oyster Dredging," a photo Bodine took of oystermen pulling shellfish onto the deck of a schooner 67 years ago. "I've seen this [picture] so many times, and I never noticed those tiny icicles [hanging from the gunwales] before. Shows how cold, nasty and dirty a kind of work it is."
A former amateur photographer and a musician, Holland can appreciate and discuss the artistry of Bodine's work, which was celebrated for its serene beauty, stark compositions and painterly use of light during his years as The Sun's main feature photographer between 1920 and 1970.
Bodine took more than 50,000 photographs during that time, documenting everything from steelworkers and marble steps to farmhands and rural roads, helping to define Maryland in the public mind. His work won numerous international prizes, and examples still hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
But he never enjoyed anything more than shooting scenes on and around the Chesapeake Bay.
"Photographing the United States was a big thrill, but I always get a bigger thrill when I make a picture of a fleet of dredge boats moving over an oyster bed on a beautiful autumn day," the usually taciturn Bodine once wrote.
The quote appeared in "Bodine's Chesapeake Bay Country," a book of the photographer's work edited by his daughter, Jennifer Bodine, a nonpracticing attorney who now serves as gatekeeper of his work — and who chose the 40 pieces for the exhibit.
"I met Jeff a couple of years ago on a visit to the museum site, and it was just clear that this would be a perfect venue for [my father's] work," says Bodine, who will give a lecture March 3 as part of the museum's Winter Maritime Seminar series.
The Annapolis Maritime Museum began as the Eastport Historical Society, an organization housed in the old Barge House on the shores of Back Creek in Eastport, a neighborhood in Annapolis.
After Tropical Storm Isabel left the building swamped in 2003, organizers determined to bring the organization back to life also leased the adjacent McNasby Oyster Co. building, a 7,000-square-foot structure with a view of the Chesapeake Bay.
As the last of the city's working oyster houses, McNasby's — the bricks of which were cemented with mortar made of oyster shells — is part of the maritime history it celebrates.
Rechristened the Annapolis Maritime Museum, the place contains permanent exhibits on the anatomy of the oyster, interactive stations on the history of working and cultural life along the bay, and even tanks that contain some of the underwater life below the surface.
Just before Christmas, Holland opened the doors for an unannounced visitor and offered up a free tour. (The place was technically closed.)
"We're not just a museum where you come and look at old, musty stuff," he said, toweling his hands dry from an aquatic installation he was completing. "We're a place where you come and connect and interact and understand, get excited, have fun and enjoy yourself. If that happens enough, and you come back enough, we hope you'll actually want to become a better steward of the bay."
As art and historical record, Bodine's work fits the mission. "This has been one of our most popular exhibits," Holland says. "The overriding comment has been, 'This is perfect for here.'"
Spaced evenly on rough, whitewashed walls, the framed images embody a tour of bay history from the late 1920s (Bodine's "Mountain of Oyster Shells," from 1929, shows a two-story pile of shells — and the vastness of the harvest decades ago) through the early 1960s, when the artist created "Moon Light Bay," a shot taken from a boat that shows the Bay Bridge as a giant black "s" curve ascending from the mists.
The exhibit preserves moments that might have been forgotten: the forbiddingly scenic look of the waters when the bay froze over in 1936; the evolution of tools used to harvest oysters, from rakes ("Raking Clams," 1948) to hand tongs ("Oyster Tonger," 1948) to mechanized patent tongs ("Maria — Patent Tonger," 1963); the construction of the Bay Bridge (the classic silhouette "Bay Bridge Rising," 1951, with the structure's one section still missing).
" History frozen in time," Holland says.
Jennifer Bodine, who was 22 when her father died of a stroke in 1970, says she can't claim to have been especially close to Aubrey Bodine, a man who drove 30,000 miles a year in pursuit of his craft and spent almost every weekend in the darkroom.
"People of extraordinary talent and vision tend not to make much time for anything else in their lives," she says, noting that her father was notoriously abrupt, even rude, at least in part because his mind was always formulating the next picture.
"We only talked about photography once, when he gave me a Rollei camera for my birthday," says Jennifer, who remembers swiping flashbulbs out of her father's car trunk so she could use them while taking pictures for her school yearbook. "Other than that, it never happened."
But she has grown closer to the man she calls "Bodine" since she began curating his work in 1999 as director of AaubreyBodine.com, a private company based out of her home in Denton that cataloges and disseminates her father's work for sale.
She learned, for instance, that her father couldn't swim — a startling fact given the risks he took while taking pictures such as "Choptank Oyster Dredgers," a work in the exhibition that Bodine created while on assignment for the Sun Magazine in 1948.
Frank Henry, the reporter who accompanied him, later said that in order to get the shot of the rain-slickered watermen, the photographer had to lean far out of the boat they were in, hanging over the stormy waters visible in the photo.
"The man had no sense," Jennifer says with a laugh, adding that Bodine once had a colleague hold him out a window by his ankles to get a shot.
Uncharacteristically, she adds, Bodine — a man who prepared for shoots by checking the Farmer's Almanac for sunrise times and even studied tidal patterns — had no idea what a fine image he'd captured until he developed the film.
The picture, one of Bodine's most widely recognized, won the $5,000 first prize in one contest and medals from as far away as Italy and South Africa.
The exhibit is steeped in one of the photographer's more controversial techniques: Though a photojournalist, Bodine thought nothing of using any darkroom method he could to enhance his pictures, from superimposing dramatic clouds to blending two images into one.
The practice fascinates Holland, who points out a pair of schooners in the 1936 photo "Ice-Locked," then walks over to another photo from the same year.
In "The Big Freeze," the ice-covered bow of a boat creates a frame across the top of the image. Snow-covered chains frame the lower edge. In the center are two suspiciously familiar schooners.
"My thought is he took this great picture of this wonderful icicle formation, then saw the blank space in the middle, thought, 'That needs something,' and added [the two boats]," Holland says. "Nowadays, you'd do that with PhotoShop and the click of a mouse. Think of the dodging, burning and masking you'd have to do in the darkroom to achieve that."
Jennifer Bodine — now hard at work on a book of Bodine's urban photos, to be published next fall — says Holland's guess is probably correct.
"Bodine always said he didn't take pictures; he made them," she says.
More than anything, as a student of the Chesapeake, museum director Holland appreciates the images for the way they preserve an instructive past.
The watermen in "Oyster Dredging" (1943), for example, are seen hauling in a netful of the shellfish — the very model, he says, of how abundant seafood was in the bay before overharvesting and pollution left their marks.
"They're getting five or six bushels in one drag," he says. "I went dredging on a skipjack a couple of years ago, and you'd find maybe a tenth of that number of oysters in each pull."
Or take "City Dock, Annapolis," from 1946, a portrait of what was once called the Market Slip — the slice of downtown waterfront now called Ego Alley for the modern fiberglass powerboats and sailboats their owners display.
Holland squints to see more closely.
The boat in the rear, the one with the traditional Chesapeake Bay deadrise hull, probably belonged to Les Trott, a local resident whose father ran the bay's first fishing charter business, he says. And two vessels in the foreground have not one but two cuddy cabins, features then exclusive to boats from the Annapolis area.
And the two small buildings in the background, seen near what is now Zachary's Jewelers on Market Street? "Those were public toilets," he says. "One of them was 'colored,' the other for whites" at the time.
Holland's gentle voice betrays sad resignation, but he knows, as Bodine did, that no picture is complete without the darks and the lights alike.
"We're trying to help [people] understand what's so important about the bay, what our connection to it has been over the centuries, and why it makes us who we are," Holland says. "If you don't care about the bay, why should you participate in trying to save it?"
If you go
What: "Photographs of the Chesapeake: The Art of A. Aubrey Bodine"
Where: Annapolis Maritime Museum, 723 Second St., Annapolis
When: noon to 4 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, through Jan. 30
Admission: free; donations accepted
Information: amaritime.org or 410-295-0104