Pay phones become Jacksonville photographer Doug Eng’s creative muse
Photographer Doug Eng explains how he works and explains his latest project documenting the remaining pay phones found throughout Jacksonville.
Doug Eng, an engineer who became a fine art photographer, turns 70 in June and is feeling some pressure to get things done, to get to hard-to-get-to places, to go down dirt trails, to be able to load and unload his kayak while lugging his photographic equipment.
And there’s still so much of his native Northeast Florida to photograph. There are its manmade structures, from gleaming ranks of downtown buildings to objects (payphone booths or tiny old houses, for example) that are humble, worn and battered. And there is its natural beauty, much of it threatened and neglected.
Eng laughs, trying to explain what attracts him: “It’s either a blatant portrayal of order and structure, or it’s complete chaos; it’s that chaotic, totally no pattern or structure, that’s also very attractive to me.”
Not long ago, three of his nature images from Florida became part of the permanent collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, where they’re now featured in an exhibition called Southland. It’s a collection of 27 Southern landscape photographers and their work from 1920 to the present. It runs through Sept. 22.
Richard McCabe, the museum’s curator of photography, said Eng was one of the first photographers who came to mind for the landscape show. Three museum supporters then stepped up to buy his work for Southland.
“The response to Doug’s work was phenomenal,” McCabe said. “He was the one everyone just gravitated toward.”
Jacksonville artist Jim Draper, who’s collaborated with Eng, said his engineering background — Eng studied structural engineering and architecture at Cornell and has worked as an engineer and in the software business — is a key to his photography. But it’s far from the only thing that defines him.
“He’s got a engineering mind and historically, if you go back in the history of art, artists were kind of mediators between the scientific world and the natural world,” Draper said. “It’s the same kind of inquisitive mind that I think our modern world has too easily pigeonholed — you become one thing or another.”
Not Eng, Draper said: “He ‘s an engineer, a naturalist, an artist.“
The family farm
Eng still takes on commercial projects and still takes photos of art for exhibition catalogs (an exacting task in its right). And he still has a passion for his craft, though his approach has changed with the years.
“Certainly it’s more personal now, rather than anything you might do because you might sell it, or somebody else might like it,” he said.
So he feels free to explore in detail the things that catch his inquisitive nature.
Like objects from the family farm that existed for 65 years in the Imeson Road area, now home to a distribution center and other useful structures. It’s where the Eng family, after immigrating from China, sold Chinese vegetables to Chinese restaurants from New York to the Midwest.
Eng remembers regular weekend visits there as a boy with his brother, remembers his grandparents speaking a language he didn’t understand, remembers sitting on a hard couch being polite, and remembers the Coke — a real treat — that they would eventually be offered.
Decades later, he documented the last days of the farm, whose final piece was sold in 2008 — poignant images of old structures and implements and fields, along with a notice announcing the rezoning of the property.
It was the first time, he said, that he shot photos that really seemed personal to him.
He’s come back to that project recently, shooting portraits of the vegetable varieties that were grown there and stenciled metal shipping labels for the various restaurants where they went (he still has the old stencil machine in his studio in the CoRK Arts District in Riverside). He’s even photographed the sites of the 16 New York restaurants that once served the family’s vegetables.
Jacksonville photographer Bill Yates says those early portraits of the family farm were what really sparked Eng’s career as an artist.
“All future work starts there,” he said.
Yates — whose 1970s images of life at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink outside Tampa were also featured at the Ogden Museum — has been a friend and mentor of Eng for years.
“He’s a documentarian at heart and has in leaps and bounds really sharpened his eye,” Yates said. “He’s showing us what he sees, and what he sees has importance. We all look, but we don’t see. He goes beyond looking, to see. That’s what photography is all about.”
Draper, meanwhile, exhibited the farm photos at the University of North Florida when he was a curator there. It was an easy decision: “That takes the top of my head off,” he said of the collection. “That’s magic.”
Engineer to artist
Eng graduated from Sandalwood High School’s first graduating class in 1972, then went north to Cornell where he got his ‘bachelor’s and master’s degrees in structural engineering, studied architecture as well and met his wife, Dorian.
He then went to work as a structural engineer for Offshore Power Systems, which proposed building two floating nuclear power plants in the St. Johns River, an idea that never came to fruition. After a couple of other engineering jobs, he got interested in personal computers and computer-aided design and taught himself the skills he needed. He then developed a point-of-sale system for office furniture dealers and, after 25 years, sold that company.
He was taking photographs the whole time, a dedicated amateur. Eng chuckles about his early days in photography, how he’d go on family trips to national parks and take more pictures of things that caught his eye —flowers, tree stumps, rocks — than he would of his children. And like just about anyone else at the time, he’d take the film to the drugstore and get back a package of pictures — so many packages.
When digital photography came along, that really ignited his interest. It liberated him, he says. He got serious about his art, bought a printer, started making prints for people. His work has been exhibited in museums, sold to collections, been displayed on downtown buildings. Even so, he admits he’s not sure what constitutes just taking pictures from what’s considered art.
“The fine art part of the photography? It took me so long to even figure that out, and I don’t have it figured out now. That was always baffling. It’s like, what constitutes it being art?”
And who defines that? he asks.
“I think being an artist has more to do with your relationship to your work rather than someone else’s definition of that,” he said.
Passion projects
Eng devotes big chunks of time to the sometimes quirky subjects that capture his collection. You can see one of them in a book labeled “The Phone Book” in his CoRK studio. It’s a collection of photos of payphones, most in disrepair, from all across Jacksonville. He liked that they were a once-ubiquitous technology that was going away, yet some examples still hung.
His first payphone image was of one on McDuff Avenue that he passed every day. Realizing it might not be there one day, he took a picture, then wondered: Are there any more of these?
There were, plenty of them, about 105 so far.
“There’s something about repetition,” Eng said. “I guess I’m sort of like this collector.”
He’s documented repurposed Skinner Dairy buildings around town, those drive-thru huts with distinctive butterfly wing roofs.
He’s shot portraits of New Orleans Creole and shotgun cottages, and of old houses on Jacksonville’s Eastside and office buildings downtown.
He also began taking photos of those mundane collections of condiments — ketchup, mustard, sugar and the like — on various restaurant tables. He smiled. “It could be an interesting series, you know: What’s on the table?”
But can one make a living doing stuff like this?
“Absolutely not,” Eng said. “This has to be for yourself. I don’t know how photographers make a living anymore. This is for whatever advocacy, whatever message you want to be able to send.”
Eng admits he’s not all that interested in shooting photographs of people. It feels to him, he says, like an invasion of their privacy.
“I’m not a people person at all. It’s too hard.” He smiled. “A tree doesn’t need a lot of cajoling. It’s much easier to photograph.”
Trees have indeed become a signature of his work. He had an entire exhibit of panoramas of managed pine forests, all the trees lined up in rows, like a barcode. He called it “Decoding the Infinite Forest.”
He’s caught striking images of hundreds of bent or downed trees in the Florida Panhandle, lashed by the fury of Hurricane Michael.
He produced a show called “Drowned Forest,” capturing the ranks of hundreds of dead trees exposed by a periodic drawdown of water from the Rodman Reservoir, which blocks the flow of the Ocklawaha River. “It’s like a dream, the calm and peacefulness of all these dead trees,” he said.
Nature photos call to him, often with a message he wants to impart.
He put together a collection of images of downtown’s McCoys and Hogans creeks, which were largely neglected for so long. He wanted to call attention to that neglect amid the beauty that hangs on there.
“As my photography subject matters change I’m responding more to things that I get upset about rather than things like, ‘Oh, this sunset’s really nice, I’m going out to County Dock.’ Anyone can take a picture if it’s beautiful — it’s a beautiful thing! But the things we drive by every day, there’s beauty in it but there’s this sort of disrespect that not only the citizens but the city has about these kind of areas. I wanted to flesh that out to show some people, this is what we have.”
Then there’s “Streaming South,” his well-received collection of Northeast Florida creeks, which, he wrote, he modeled on “the style of early 19th-century landscape painters who visited Florida and found an unspoiled paradise.”
He said he didn’t know much about these creeks until he explored them by kayak, sometimes within earshot of cars on nearby bridges or the sound of heavy equipment tearing up woods for the next development.
Pushing deeper down the creeks, in all the seasons, he found lingering, tenacious beauty. “It’s kind of like a religious experience, being in these places,” Eng said.
He laughed: He got caught up in that exploration. “At that time my wife said, ‘Aren’t we, like, going to go to national parks anymore?’ I said, ‘Well there’s everything I need to shoot right here!’”
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Eng gave a subtitle to the “Streaming South” collection: “Illuminations from a Journey Home.”
Home, of course, is Jacksonville, which he calls a fine place to photograph.
“I would never leave Jacksonville. I mean, I’ve certainly visited a lot of places. New Orleans, I would love to live there, or Asheville, or whatever, but nah, I’m not going to move from Jacksonville. There’s something about being home-home, and despite all the work we have to do here, I want to be part of it.”
He paused. That sounded awfully a lot like a statement of purpose. So Eng laughed, puncturing the seriousness.
But he returned to that theme a little later in the conversation, when asked to reflect on his photographic career.
“This is a good life right now,” he said. “I’m very fortunate to be able to work on these things, to have the time and resources to do it. I think artists have a responsibility to do things that are going to make it a better place for everybody else. I think that’s very much implied by being an artist.”
