fictographica005: Wilfred Eng

For much of his life he had operated a commercial portrait studio on Grant Street in San Francisco, which he occasionally closed to indulge his famous wanderlust. Among the Aperture images reprinted from the 1870s was a picture made in that studio of a Chinese woman and her son seated on the same divan as the one in the self-portraits. The pattern of the fabric matched. A small tear appeared in one corner. When I bent over the broken plate with a loupe, I saw the same tear and said, "Holy shit," out loud. The five self-portraits had been made in San Francisco  and must have been brought here some time later. Eng must have brought them himself. Given that they were cumbersome and easily broken, I wondered why he'd bothered. Vanity, maybe. "This man loves his mirrors," Alfred Stieglitz had observed when the two first met. In 1912 he had invited Eng to show at his 291 Gallery, which had marked the beginning of their prickly friendship. "Wherever we walked, even along busy streets," Stieglitz wrote, "he was forever giving bird-like twitches of his head in order to catch glimpses of himself in shop windows."

--The Lost Glass Plates of Wilfred Eng

fictographica003: Wilfred Eng

A certain parity was at work in the world. Disappointment, disguised by years of routine humility, was bound to yield singular, penetrating fantasies: the iris dilated, the raw world flooded back in. For just a moment these were not portraits but self-portraits, and a palpitating certainty would not breathe denial or allow that they had been made by anyone by Wilfred Eng.

Eng, the great landscape photographer.

Then, the moment passed. I let out a breath and thought, No way. Fantasies turned into torture if we took them too seriously. I'd seen later portraits of Eng, and the likeness to the face in this close-up was striking. But the idea was ludicrous. It was true that Eng had lived in Seattle for brief periods, but he hadn't made his first trip here until 1881. By then he was using smaller, 3x5 plates. Most of his larger, older negatives had been destroyed in the 1906 quake and fire in San Francisco, Eng's nominal home. San Francisco was my hometown as well. There, and throughout the world, Eng was revered as one of the the fathers of American photography. Biographies had probed his towering dichotomies. No less a figure than Alfred Stieglitz had called him a genius. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro--the list of his artistic heirs was endless. Even painters such as Thomas Hart Benton acknowledged a debt to Eng. It was crazy to think that the work of this giant might end up where I could find it.

--Thomas Orton, The Lost Glass Plates of Wilfred Eng (1999)