Barbara Morris Goodbody, an innovative photographer and beloved figure of the Maine arts community, passed away on January 13 at the age of 88. The news of her death was confirmed by her family.
Goodbody, also known as a passionate collector, philanthropist, and humanitarian, experimented with myriad photographic techniques and genres throughout her late-blooming career. Documentary and abstract photography, digital collage, and Holga plastic camera images, and the mysterious process of mordançage are among the many approaches she embraced in her practice.
Born in Muncie, Indiana, in 1936, Goodbody took up photography later in life, following a career in public relations (spearheading former United States Secretary of State Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign led her to Maine in the early 1970s). A lifelong photo aficionado, she enrolled in a darkroom course at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport upon turning 50. As part of a group of women known as the Rockport Six, Goodbody helped the school achieve accreditation to grant Masters of Fine Art degrees and become the prestigious Maine Media Workshops and College.
The daughter of a naval officer, she was accustomed to traveling and loved immersing herself in other cultures. Her earliest photography reflects a documentary style, recording people and places she encountered. But as she dove deeper into her medium, Goodbody experimented with other processes; in Paris, for example, she learned the mordançage process, an alternative technique pioneered by Jean-Pierre Sudre in the 1960s that involves chemically manipulating a print to achieve a surreal, haunting effect. Her endgame was finding methods to elicit something more profound about her subjects than that which a straightforward image could communicate.
A student of comparative religions, Goodbody sought to convey the concept of “Indra’s net” — a Vedic scriptural metaphor for the interpenetration of all things — by abstracting light grids that implied an infinity of connection coursing through the universe. She exploited the low-fidelity blurring and light leaks of a Holga plastic camera to capture the faded glory of Havana, and mordançage allowed her to lift emulsions from photos of flowers, enhancing their sense of ephemeral beauty by making them look already partially gone.
Even a sunrise was never merely a sunrise. Of Goodbody’s Salutations to the Dawn (2009) series, shot in Ireland during the winter solstice, University of Texas professor of photography Brenton Hamilton said in a 2019 essay that in these images she “shows us light as a source of awakening.”
Goodbody was also a prolific collector of photography, painting, decorative and ritualistic objects from Indigenous cultures and more. She donated her own works and parts of her collections to many museums nationwide. But her fervid belief in world peace and opportunity for all also impelled her into active involvement and funding of many causes, including co-founding the Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Maine, supporting the student-led Nobel-winning organization PeaceJam and the National Wildlife Federation, jumpstarting the Center for Compassion at the University of Southern Maine, and working with Folk Arts Rajasthan and the Tibetan Home School, among many others.
“Barbara’s compassionate worldview catalyzed Maine’s cultural infrastructure and shaped its landscape,” Denise Froehlich, director of the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, which Goodbody also helped found, told Hyperallergic. “Her institutional leadership and philanthropic initiatives established foundational frameworks that continue to influence the state’s artistic and sociocultural trajectory.”
Goodbody is survived by her three children, Bridget, Robert, and Jim Goodbody; and four grandchildren, Ben, Abigail, Marcus, and Hannah.
