By Joshua Lickteig | Contributing Writer
A mid the black-and-white interior of Autumn Coffee (3286 NE Killingsworth Street), a gallery of photographs by Franklin Engel enamors patrons with Portland’s architecture (namely bridges), hand-painted art cars of decades yore, and urban and scenic environments of Europe. The café’s bright modern space perfectly complements the local artist’s documentary and spirited works.
Light pours in through a tall window onto Engel’s photographs, whether in colorful spans of stillness, sepia meditations or cascading greyscales of streets and landscapes. Near a long mochawalnut table, there is a panoply of early bridge photographs – Hawthorne, Steel, and Broadway (the city’s first drawbridge) to mention a few – and a selection from Engel’s Painted Cars, “counter-culture statements about [. . .] the automobile”, the artist’s statement reads.
On a Saturday afternoon, I met with him in his studio to learn more.
Engel, 79, grew up in Mt. Vernon not far from The Bronx. His father worked in Manhattan and as a child he enjoyed theater, museums, and jazz in New York. By the age of 9, he was shooting with a Kodak Brownie, a box camera with a rotary shutter. In 1963, he recalls, he and a highschool friend would take pictures at JFK airport, once suddenly riveted by Sonny and Cher waiting for their flights. He became drawn to the process of darkroom printing, and the required precision of working with negatives and chemicals; when developing and printing took “hours and chemistry, not minutes and megabytes,” he says.
Engel moved to Portland in 1969 and had his first exhibition in the city around 1972. Of the travel images on display, he says, “My first journey to Spain in 1984 was through Andalucía on my old 3-speed Raleigh English racer. I carried with me a Hasselblad with two backs, two lenses, a tripod and two 35mm cameras. Multiple visits to Portugal were spent documenting a small subculture in the village of Belmonte.”
Between 1987 and 1997, Engel worked as a bridge tender, ensuring 24-hour access to vessels traveling on the Willamette. “I spent many hours looking out the window at dynamic skies, strumming a guitar or reading… with unique views of the bridge deck, the girders, the counterweights, and the suspension cables. As I lifted the bridges, clambered along the elevated catwalks, and greased the massive gears – I grew to respect and delight in the uniqueness of each bridge. I’ve always marveled at how man can create such incredible machinery.”
As he built his portfolio and developed his craft, Engel worked as a wedding photographer and with Yuen Lui studio which had expanded from Seattle’s Chinatown.
Overall Engel’s work evokes a lyricism of ongoing transformation within the elements and passageways of life. “Photography provides a still moment of the transition of time,” he says. The show can be viewed through the end of February. Postcards and prints are for sale.
Joshua Lickteig is an artist and engineer. He was born near the other Milwaukee and has been in Portland since 2018. His latest book of poems is called Half Moon Day Sun.