Ed Watts Does William Eggleston.

It's about time Manchester Photography did a post about a Manchester photographer. It's Ed Watts I'm referring to. I'm sure a lot of you know him. He's been organising photo related stuff at The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and further afield with gems such as The Alternative Camera Club, Roast Beef and such like for ages.
Here though I'm interested in what he's been up to with his own photography. The above picture, that even the most photographically illiterate provincial council art gallery curator should spot is William Eggleston's 1973 piccy Greenwood Mississippi.
Watts, and I'm going to call him that rather than Ed so that I sound more impartial and professional, has been thinking about this photo for years. I can testify that he has wanted to recreate that space for donkey's. Well thanks to the folk at this years FORMAT Festival he's going to build that ceiling as a life size installation/sculpture and invite others to photograph this iconic scene. I wonder if that room was ever photographed by anyone else? It's so famous a ceiling but it's the only photo I know of the place which is unusual because as we all know photographers love to photograph the same thing over and over again. Just look at that canal/river in Hackney, I'm sick of the fucking sight of it.
Anyway Ed, I mean Watts is going to give all of us photographers the chance to photograph that red ceiling again and again and again and we can flood the internet with shit loads of versions of it so when we next type in Greenwood, Mississippi 1973 we will get the same but different.
As I said in the last post too many photographers call themselves photo artists without doing anything more than point and shoot. Watts is screwing that notion up with this piece.