Yep, it's a tree. Well, it's a bunch of trees, really, but...

So, I remember seeing a William Eggleston photograph for the first time. God knows, that was a long, long, and, let me repeat, long time ago. "American Photographer" was a new magazine at the time, and I'm pretty sure that's where I saw it, but, who knows, maybe it was in "Modern Photography", or "Popular Photography" (though the latter is doubtful since Eggleston's stuff would have been anything but popular). It was his shot of a pair of brown shoes under a bed. At the time, my photographic hero was Pete Turner. If you've got any idea who Peter Turner is, you're probably able to guess my first reaction to Eggleston - "What the...?". Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fan of Turner's work. That guy produced photographs that had nuclear-powered colour. It was as if the colours in the Kodachromes were squeezed straight from tubes of oil paints. I mean, they glowed, and were thick. It was as though, had you access to the original transparencies, you'd be able to smoodge your fingers around in the dyes.

And yet, the Eggleston shot... After the "What the...?" reaction came the, "Hmmm.....I...I...like it." I doubt that I could ever explain why I liked it, but I did. So, what's this ramble got to do with the price of beef? I have no idea. Other than, I suppose, the two bent my photographic thinking. Other than that my response to these two different (but similar) photographic styles has pretty obviously shaped my own. Both photographed (at least, at times, in Turner's case) the mundane. Eggleston does it in a very straightforward way. Turner turns the mundane to neon. I wonder what it would be like to send them both out to the same spot at the same time to photograph what they saw. "Pete, this is Bill. Bill, this is Pete."