Frank Eugene

His mother was Hermine Selinger Smith, a singer who performed in local German beer halls and theaters.

In 1886, he moved to Munich in order to attend the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied drawing and stage design.

After graduating from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, he started a career as a theatrical portraitist, drawing portraits of actors and actresses.

He continued his interest in photography, although little is known of his teachers or influences.He returned to the United States, and in 1899, he exhibited photographs at the Camera Club of New York under name Frank Eugene.

The critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote a review of the show, saying "It is the first time that a truly artistic temperament, a painter of generally recognized accomplishments and ability asserts itself in American photography.

He assertively manipulated his negatives with both scratches and brush strokes, creating prints that had the appearance of a blend between painting and photography.

Photographic historian Weston Naef described his style this way: The very boldness with which Eugene manipulated the negative by scratching and painting forced even those with strong sympathy for the purist line of thinking like White, Day and Stieglitz to admire Eugene's particular touch...[he] created a new syntax for the photographic vocabularity, for no one before him had hand-worked negatives with such painterly intentions and a skill unsurpassed by his successors.