Bafford was a master of the bromoil process, usually making romantic images of rural life and the environs of Baltimore. He spent his entire professional career in the commercial printing industry. He was born on January 16, 1902, and was orphaned three years later. He was raised in Baltimore by his grandmother, but forced by poverty to leave school at age eleven to work in a factory. In 1916, he secured a job at a commercial printer and began his life-long vocation.
Bafford received his first camera in 1914 and a few years later made his first important photograph. Taken surreptitiously due to wartime restrictions, it pictures a workman steam cleaning the wheels of a locomotive.
Photographic salons in Rochester and Portland, Maine, quickly accepted the print, and Bafford’s long exhibition career commenced.
During the 1930s and 1940s, his work was repeatedly shown in salons in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Wilmington, Delaware. Even after the mid-century demise of pictorialism, Bafford continued to submit work to camera-club sponsored exhibitions for two decades.
He had three solo shows at the Smithsonian Institution, in 1950, 1952, and 1956, and one each at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Arts Society of Washington, D.C., in the mid-1950s.
Baltimore institutions held Bafford in high esteem. For example, the Baltimore Camera Club named an award in his honor in 1953 and honored him at numerous surprise banquets. In 1975, the University of Maryland Baltimore County presented a one-person exhibition of his recent color photographs and named its photography collection after him. Most of his work now resides there. Edward L. Bafford died on February 5, 1981, in Glen Arm, Maryland.