Artist Captures The ​“Future History” Of New Haven

Daniel Eugene was dressed down. Classical music played over the speakers on a recent visit to his Westville live and work space, periodically punctuated by the ping of incoming emails.

Eugene is, after all, a busy person, especially as he shifts his art from pens to lens. 

Daniel Eugene has been a much-buzzed-about character and darling of New Haven’s art scene for a while now, due to his meditative line drawings. He is well met, fiercely intellectual, and though he can be intimidating at times, his welcoming demeanor tells you that he’s never seen himself that way. He produces omnivorously, drawing, painting, singing, writing, and increasingly folding photography into his daily practice.

“It’s a way to taste life twice,” Eugene said. ​“I tend to bring my camera everywhere I go. It’s an extension of my autobiographical process.”

Eugene is a consummate self-interrogator, keeping voluminous journals. His art turns this lens to the physics and metaphysics of the world.

“Photography changes the way I see space and the relationship between people in a physical space. It shows me where people gather and how they move when they get there,” Eugene said. ​“There is little visually in common with photography and my drawings, but there is a lot of suggested line in visual experience that photography can capture. In photography I’m interested in using visual information to convey non-visual information.”

Eugene’s work is often intended to eff the ineffable, and in this sense his most striking photography is his ongoing documentation of New Haven’s drag events.

“Photographing drag shows was the first time that I consciously decided to document an event. It was the first time I felt like a historian,” Eugene said.

Eugene has been shooting the shows as well as performing in them as Sorcia Warhol, a queen conjured from Eugene’s life in art and love of pop divas. Sorcia sings the hits of yesterday and today with color and charisma. The photographs show the power of the performers, and get to the core of the performance.

“After becoming more invested in drag, my interest is now in the physics of drag,” Eugene said. ​“Drag is a spell that precedes you. Watching an audience part like a sea for a performer, or flock to them — it increases your aura hugely, and makes photographing a queen with an audience fascinating. I became immersed in the subject. It changes the way you see. It’s not just an amazing drag queen, it’s Kiki Lucia, who is also Patrick Dunne, or Sylvia Hart, who is also Kevin Martino. You see their different personalities. Some don’t photograph well and some pose. Some are going 100 miles an hour and don’t even notice that they’re being photographed.”

There’s a sort of ego death that can go along with being photographed. Photography is not necessarily about making the subject look good; it’s about parting the veil and revealing the reality. It’s the relationship between the subject and the spontaneity around it.

“Those pictures where you don’t have a pose tend to speak much more true as time goes by,” Eugene said. ​“If you look at a picture of yourself, your first thought is, ​‘oh, I don’t look good.’ Take that picture and throw it in a drawer. Look at it in 20 years and your first thought will be, ​‘Oh, I look so young.’”

This is what Eugene means by the phrase ​“future history”: ​“The idea of future history is something that is really interesting to me. The reality that you’ll only be able to experience some elements of today by looking at them tomorrow. The experience completes itself as a result of having time pass. Having something is completed by no longer having it.”

Eugene has also been taking portraits of houses and buildings around Westville and Edgewood.

“As much as it is about place, it’s also about what the space suggests. With the houses I photograph, I’m very interested in the story and how the history of the place is remembered in the physical object. Almost like a haunting.”

Eugene finds inspiration in some of his first photographs, taken at the heyday of formerly New Haven-based musician José Oyola​‘s Taco Hut music series.

“There were a lot of really precious moments in the early 2010s Taco Hut days,” he said. ​“It was a great scene that was simultaneously falling apart. I’ve been going back through those photographs, or what I’m sort of calling ​‘the early work.’”

He shot photos voraciously in those days. His method of constantly shooting by the seat of his pants gives his photos a feeling of finding beauty where it shouldn’t be. Where his drawing has felt increasingly intentional over the years, his photography now seems delightfully incidental, like Edward Steichen’s 1915 portrait of a milk bottle.

“I feel like an artist who has a camera, but not like a photographer. I know great photographers and I’m not like them. My photographs tend to be very open in order to capture the most information possible,” Eugene said. He went as far as to say that he didn’t feel like a photographer.

“I feel like an artist with a camera,” he said.