A still photographer, cinematographer, editor and documentarian, Eagle emigrated to the US from Hungary with his family in 1929. He joined the Film and Photo League, an organization concerned with documentary photographs and newsreels, in 1932 and began photographing Orthodox Jews on Manhattan's Lower East Side two years later. (The photographs were posthumously published in a volume entitled "At Home Only With God".) Eagle worked for the Works Project Administration (WPA), as a freelance photographer for "The Saturday Evening Post" and as a cinematographer for both avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter ("Dreams that Money Can Buy" 1946) and documentarian Robert Flaherty ("Louisiana Story" 1948). He also made several documentaries of his own, taught filmmaking at New York's New School for Social Research and contributed to books about modern art and the Actors Studio.