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About

Frank Engel, Photographer

I began photographing with a Brownie Hawkeye about age nine, developing my own black-and-white film, and making contact prints with a small light box. The thrill of seeing an image develop in a darkroom, smelling the chemicals and navigating the process with the aid of a dim orange light captured my imagination for a lifetime. I made images for another three decades but did not take the hobby seriously until my 40s when I realized I had both an “eye” and a passion for the medium.

I worked as a studio portrait photographer and wedding photographer for a number of years, built a home studio and continued to work independently and sporadically until the digital age of photography firmly and irreversibly established itself. Although I continue to shoot digital format with less-technical cameras, it is my backlog of thousands of chromes and black-and-white proof sheets that intrigues me most. I now have time to reconsider gems I hastily overlooked during the past 30 years.

Photographs, for me, document a place, a time; something I see and learn about. Black-and-white portraiture, my favorite photographic pursuit, is the most satisfying and the most challenging. Andrew Wyeth referred to a painting of a hay bale as a portrait, and I’ve come to accept his idea that a painting, engraving or photograph must say something about the subject—whatever that is. The product must elicit a mood, an emotion, a feeling, a deeper understanding or appreciation of the person, place or thing depicted; that is what makes a picture a portrait.

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