Jeffrey Engel
“What I Remember” is the working title for a photo series I am currently undertaking. In general, most of my photography attempts to not just objectively remind us of the things that happen, as the old saying goes, but rather, to subjectively show us things we remember whether they are real or not. As years go by, dreams and memories become similar, and whether real or not, our mind treats them as real experiences. My photography in “What I Remember” will seek to express the surrealism of this imagery, combining fairy-tale-like settings with both imagined and remembered subjects. The result intends to border the playful with the profound, to bridge childhood and adulthood, and blend history with fantasy.
Biography
Jeffrey Engel was born in 1971 near Frankfurt, West Germany to a German mother and Swiss-German American father stationed there by the US Army. He grew up in Michigan and Florida, surrounded by friends of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities due to his father’s work for a major international chemical company. Art, the universal language, became his favorite language as a result. He spend most of his time drawing and painting and won many contests in his childhood. In 1993 and 1994, he finished his studies in art and graphic design in the School of Visual Arts and Dance at Florida State University. Some of his early influences occurred during the advent of digital imaging and “electronic art” in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when the field was still a frontier and people were exploring the medium as a new method for communication rather than a replacement for the old methods. In 1994 he co-founded, with Virgil “Rogue” duPont III, the Graduating Artists exhibition at FSU. Graduating Artists was an entrepreneurial inspiration to showcase their and their fellow non-BFA students’ work since the School of Visual Arts only funded a BFA exhibition. It was this pioneering spirit that Jeffrey was always interested in and thinking about in the periphery, however work and career prevented much further time to be spent involved and his creative spirit dwindled as the Internet Boom went through its honeymoon and subsequent crash. After he was laid off from his position as a creative director and strategy consultant, he received out of nowhere a new burst of creativity. Acquiring a cheap digital camera, he spent hours upon hours per week taking pictures. He has not looked back since and has barely slowed down. He helped found Panospin Studios, a panoramic photography company, with his friend and business partner, Carlton SooHoo. Not only has the new era of pixels and instant web access to information given him a new palette in terms of modern creative methods, it also instilled a desire to get back to his roots. He is now exploring the bridge between traditional Polaroid and large format photography with modern digital photographic imaging and output, effectively bridging his art background with his photographic present.
Jeffrey Engel's Website
