Frank Eugene

Born Frank Eugene Smith in New York to German parents, Eugene studied drawing and stage design at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste München) from 1886, before returning to New York. He combined his painterly training with photography, scratching photographic negatives with engraving tools to produce prints that read simultaneously as photographs and as etchings — a radical pictorialist intervention. Featured in Stieglitz's Camera Work no. 25 (1909) with portraits and figure studies (Adam and Eve, Brigitta, Frau Ludwig von Hofmann), he became a founding member of the Photo-Secession (1902) and the Linked Ring. In 1906 he relocated permanently to Germany, where he became lecturer at the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie in Munich (from 1907). In 1913 he was appointed Royal Professor of Pictorial Photography at the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts of Leipzig (Königliche Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe zu Leipzig) — the first university chair in the world dedicated to pictorial photography, institutionally establishing photography as art. Held at MET, MoMA, RPS, V&A, Münchner Stadtmuseum. Public domain since 2007. His scratched-negative technique remains an inspiration for Maison Picturale's mixed-media interventions on negatives.