Through the lens with Robin Eagan

Words+Portraits of Robin Eagan: Mike Blanchard

One day after the recent winter storms had dropped trees all over town, I was out photographing the destruction and I ran into a photographer named Robin Eagan carrying a Rolleiflex camera. We introduced ourselves, spoke for a few minutes and exchanged business cards. 

 Eagan, 42, grew up in Stockton, Modesto and the Bay Area. He’s a lean fellow with a shock of gray hair and numerous tattoos. He has piercing eyes and an intent look, but unlike some photographers on the street he was happy to talk for a minute. 

 When I got home I looked up his website and was blown away by the depth and vision of his photography. Naturally I wanted to find out more about him so we arranged an interview. 

 His work shows a sophisticated command of lighting that is the trademark of the well-trained professional studio photographer, which is how he makes his living.

 But there is another side to what he does. His personal work is like a scene from a psychological play. There are touchstones from Sandy Skoglund and Jan Sudek to the visual language of Mid-Century television and Surrealist collage. Eagan’s personal photography takes you on a journey and tells a story about alienation and depression. Looking at the images there is a sense that something emotional has just happened and you are seeing something out of context. You wonder what is going on here and what will happen next.  

 Each of these pieces is developed from a concept. Each of these set pieces (for lack of a better term) has a poem that accompanies it. They have specific meaning for Eagan. They are cathartic for him. A way to engage in visual therapy.

Like many photographers there are different sides to what Eagan is doing. There are his psychological set pieces; a set of insightful portraits; his travel and street photos ; and there is his commercial work. They are all linked. You can see reflections of the set pieces in the travel photos and there are aspects of the portraits in the set pieces. They are all a reflection of Eagan’s inner life.

 With the set pieces he builds the scene from a basic concept and then gathers and tries out different visual ideas and props in the studio, working up the tableau until he is happy with the scene and what it says to him. Often, he enlists friends to help out or be in the photograph.

 Eagan’s girlfriend Crystal Azua is a lead stylist at the World Market studio and she is instrumental in helping to find props and putting the shoots together for his personal projects.

You can’t see it in these photos but when he prints and frames his set pieces he will layer the prints and burn them or tear them as an added psychological dimension. The frames are carefully selected to compliment the photo.

Eagan has a relationship with photography that goes back to his childhood.

 His grandmother Dorothy Eagan, who helped raise him, was a professional photographer and talented amateur artist and is, understandably, one of his main influences. 

 “She was from Modesto. The studio was gone by the time I got there. She had already gone through a divorce. … But she was still very creative and had all her cameras. … She was very inspirational.

 “Another influence is my aunt Zan. We have always been close because of our creativity. In the family we are the two who have to do it. She dabbled in photography because of her mom but she really picked up painting and she’s still painting to this day. She was an art teacher. She was a huge influence on me.

 “I got into photography early and bailed out for years and then fell back into it in my 30s. When I was a kid I would always have fun with her (Dorothy’s) cameras. And when I was a teenager I always would carry your throw-away cameras. I never had my own. I never went and got my own because I was always told ‘It’s too expensive. It’s too expensive of a hobby to really dive into. It’s too expensive to make your career.’

 “She [his grandmother] wanted me to be a cartoonist. She thought I could draw so well that that was her goal for me. I did not agree. I could look at something and draw it but I could not just. … Anything that would come out of my head I could not do it, but I could draw any of the Disney cartoons and just draw exact. So she thought that that was where I was headed.”

 I think it’s good to be able to draw as any kind of visual artist. To be able to make a sketch and work things out but also as a tool for learning and growing. Did you study photography?

 “No. Everything I learned originally was from her. Years later I was like, I had a job and made decent money and I thought, ‘You know, I think it’s time I want to buy a camera. I really miss it.’ So literally just started with a little Rebel T3 and I just started going out and taking photos of nature. I did a lot of macro photography, like getting into the bees and insects and the whole world that we walk by every day and don’t think about. It’s incredible. So that made me just fall in love with photography all over again.

 “It’s such a huge jump from taking photos of bees to doing what I’m doing now. But I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Go in that direction. And so I just started studying myself and then really understanding that lighting is the number one thing. 

 “I realized that the easiest route doing photography, and getting out of the job that I had, would be doing wedding photography. And so I made that jump. It was very scary to leave my comfortable job but I just had to do it. I couldn’t do it (the job) anymore. It wasn’t long before I realized that weddings wasn’t what I wanted to do.

 “I have a friend that has a company shooting weddings and I just started doing that, working for her. I would just pass it (the memory cards) over. I’ll take the pay cut and just do it more times a month.”

 About that time Eagan got a job at a studio, but it was not a very creative situation so when he was offered a tech position at World Market Studio in Stockton he realized that it was an opportunity, but he had to decide if the step back from photographer to tech was something he could live with. In the end he decided to take the position and learn as much as he could while making it clear to the studio that he wanted to move up to the position of photographer down the line. 

 After about a year of tech he was given the opportunity to move up to photographer. It’s a position that he has made the most of and continues to occupy. This has allowed him to gradually build his own studio out in the country in West Sacramento. He shoots product work and portraits and all the things a working pro needs to do to keep the lights on.

 “I’m hoping to shoot more people, career-wise. I want to do more beauty and fashion and things like that. I enjoy it a lot more.”

 Looking at your website there are a lot of interesting set pieces.

 “Well that’s all art that I’ve done for myself, stuff that’s in my head. It’s like my painting.”

 If you think of that as your painting, what are the things that you’re looking at? What are the things you find interesting that you draw inspiration from?

 “Woof! Well ,,, um, doing photography as a career made me completely lose my love for it, right? I hit a hard spot where I realized that I had not been creating anything. I used to always use my camera and take a photo and turn it into something more than just a photo in a frame. I always want to make it something more whether I add paint, add resin, I burn it, make it multi-layer. I realized over two years had gone by and I hadn’t made anything.

 “So I said, ‘I’m taking a vacation and I’m going to Thailand and Vietnam and I’m just taking my camera and just to get back into the love of doing street photography; I haven’t done it forever.’ And it really helped me get back to my love for the camera. Three months after I got back, Covid hit. So I was home for three months without work so I just started taking self-portraits, being creative and trying to do different scenes and different things. I just felt that creative itch again, I’m by myself. I want to take photos of people more because at work I’m always taking photos of things. 

 “Flash forward; I’m still shooting product, however I still feel that itch to be creative. So I just started testing with some people from World Market, like some stylists, and being more creative. Eventually I started getting people who would be willing to model. So then I would come up with these scenes in my head but they are all kind of based around depression.

 “Another thing that Covid brought was me dedicating time to learn how to meditate. I had always wanted to do it. … At one point I was thinking about art and where I wanted to take it. That was what I was meditating on. What is something you know really well that feels good to express and to get out and that’s depression. 

 “Ever since I was a little kid I’ve had depression, so it’s a creative outlet to let shit out. Each of these pieces has a poem. Like all the ornate studio set pieces all have poems that go with them.

 “Some of those pieces will start as a sketch or doodle or a sketch in my head of what I want to do. I’ll come in here and I’ll set up the base of what I want to do but then it can totally grow from that. New elements get added. I’ll be, ‘Oh! Let’s do this.” Like sketching out and erasing. It’s just the same thing.”

 You get a chance to think about it and try things.

 “Yeah, I’ll think about lighting and I try to be very intentional. Lighting is my main thing. There’s definitely elements that are in multiple shots. There’s a lot of clocks. Time is something that’s haunted me as it has everybody else but it’s something I always feel I’m out of.

 “I wrote a poem about time, a quick little thing:

There it goes 

There it is 

It makes subjects subjective 

Always accepted 

With no exceptions 

I need a fix 

I want it 

I hate it 

It keeps me alive  

With my death in its grips”

 When you discovered through meditation that this is the subject that you wanted and this is how you want to relate to it, did you find that there was an outpouring of work?

 “Yes and no. I didn’t have a place to do this. I had all these ideas brewing but I didn’t have a place to do this. I moved to a house which gave me more space. For one shot we emptied everything out of the office, put some lawn in there and created a scene.

 “Another one, we had to take the door off (the bathroom) to get the shot and built the garden in the bathroom. So I was doing it in my house. It was still a lot of work.”

 Eagan ended up losing the house but he managed to get the space he is in now, in a studio complex out in the farmland of Yolo County. With the money from shooting commercial jobs he has slowly built the studio infrastructure and now he has a nice well-equipped space to create.

 There are shelves with vintage housewares, luggage and clothing in one end of the studio, and in the other end lighting gear, studio equipment and stands fill the frame. 

 “I just thrift for random things at antique stores. And even going around to an antique store I will see a piece that makes me nostalgic for a time, which then will lead me to a scene and how to make it. It literally just pops up and then it grows from there.”

 That is an aspect of craftsmanship where you find something that is inspirational, and if you are open to letting your mind work things grow from there. I noticed that there are a lot of flowers and natural elements to the scenes. What does that mean to you?

 “Hope. Just a love of nature. In some of the scenes you will see someone that’s very sad surrounded by flowers. But they don’t see them. … It’s an undertone.”

 That reminds me of the concept of the Prisoner in Tarot. The Prisoner is in a prison of their own making. One step to the side and they are out of prison but they can’t see that. Does that relate to the concept of depression in the photos?

 “Exactly! Yes, that’s the link.” 

 In the scenes there is a juxtaposition of melancholy with this bright ’60s nostalgic advertising vision. 

 “I like to just let people read it. I don’t want to take anything from anybody. If somebody sees something that I didn’t, great. I don’t want to take that from them.”

You can see more work by Robin Eagan by going to his website

https://robin-eagan.squarespace.com