Laguna Beach photographer makes tourists the focus of his art

Many of the millions of tourists who flock to Laguna Beach are there to see art — not to be the art.

But local photographer Jamie Eisman is turning the lens around on them. He’s taken to snapping pictures of the art colony’s visitors in their natural surroundings: restaurants, crosswalks, Main Beach.

“I look for people doing people things,” said the 71-year-old street photographer.

In a town saturated by out-of-towners, many locals view the peak summer tourist season either with anticipation or dread.

Eisman, a Philadelphia native and recent Laguna transplant, finds inspiration from the throngs of tourists lounging at the beach, hauling beach paraphernalia through downtown or just standing at an intersection looking confused.

“It runs the whole gamut of human experience. You see people fighting, you see people loving, you see people frustrated and anxious and ‘Oh my God, where am I going to park?’ ” he said. “It’s just the daily drama. And when we get to look at it from the other side, as locals, it … brings out emotions that we’re not always proud of.”

Eisman will admit he has “screamed and yelled” when he couldn’t find a parking spot in town. When he moved to Laguna Beach in October 2017, he spent a few months stewing.

For a person who avoids Disneyland because of the crowds, Eisman at first was shocked at the number of people flooding Laguna’s streets. Then came annoyance — no parking, miles of traffic, rude pedestrians.

Then came amusement.

And then photos. Thousands of them.

“It’s just the lifeblood of the town. This is Laguna’s circulatory system,” Eisman said of tourism. “We wouldn’t exist as we are without them; we would be something else. We would be an art colony with a couple of thousand artists in town, and what good is it if nobody sees it?”

About 6 million tourists come to Laguna Beach each year, according to a study commissioned in 2016 by Visit Laguna Beach, the city’s visitors bureau. Visitor spending topped $556.6 million that year.

Though Eisman may still get peeved at not getting a seat in his favorite restaurant, he’s developed a more laid-back approach to Laguna’s visitors.

“You gotta be patient and embrace it, and it’s all good,” he said. “It’s all part of the overall human drama. I don’t hate them, I don’t love them. They are a necessary part of keeping Laguna running.”

Eisman’s tourist watching began before moving to Laguna Beach, during a trip to Rome in 2016 as — you guessed it — a tourist.

While sightseeing at the Colosseum, he couldn’t help but notice “the invasion of the selfie stick.” He snapped a few hundred photos of other tourists on that trip. He especially loved shots of people primping in front of their cameras.

“It’s like these people are dancing like nobody’s watching, and I love it … they’re being themselves,” Eisman said. “They’re not self-conscious, they’re looking ridiculous.”

Eisman said he always tries to keep a low profile when he’s a camera-toting traveler.

“I’m acutely aware of myself as a tourist,” he said. “I don’t particularly like or embrace the idea, but I accept it as a necessary evil.”

Eisman was inspired to do a series of tourist photos in Laguna Beach after he met Sandra Jones Campbell, a painter whose exhibits at Laguna’s Festival of Arts and Pacific Edge Gallery show scenes of people eating, drinking, smoking and playing. Her depiction of the everyday human experience persuaded Eisman to take on the tourist idea.

Campbell, a Laguna resident of 32 years, said Eisman’s work is “totally off the wall.” She said she can’t remember another local artist who has chosen tourists as an art subject. His work captures “a focal point of a moment in time,” she said.

“It’s a statement of what goes on here,” Campbell said. “It’s like a wonderful migration of people coming in here to go to the beach, to sit in the water. And then they leave again — they go out of the canyon in different directions.”

Eisman took a circuitous route to Laguna Beach. He began his artistic trade studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but switched to photography when he realized he could “say more with a camera than … a paintbrush.”

His photography took him through the advertising industry, where he shot products and fashion, and then to medicine, where he photographed for medical textbooks. He retired from the non-governmental organization Rivers of the World, where he worked for about eight years shooting in other countries.

Street photography has challenged him to “just let it happen” and relinquish some of the control he was accustomed to in his past work.

“Street photography is a whole radical departure for someone who really cut his teeth in the studio,” Eisman said. “The control that you have in the studio that you don’t have on the street is about as far diametrically opposed as you can get.”

So far, Eisman said, he has posted only snippets of the tourist series to a local Facebook page. He anticipates getting the photos into a gallery once he builds enough of a collection. Until then, he’s displaying a few sunset photos at the LagunaArt.com Gallery on North Coast Highway.

Why sunsets?

“Because the tourists seem to like them,” he said.

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