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features
Shot at greatness
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hotographer David Eustace is talking to his twentysomething self. “If you don’t go up to that guy and ask him if you can take his picture, you won’t be taking a 1,300-mile road trip across America with a daughter who hasn’t even been born yet, and you won’t be given $80,000 to do it. You won’t be photographing Paul McCartney, Sophia Loren or John Mills, going to Brazil, Beirut or Asia. You won’t be doing any of that if you don’t take 31 January 2015
that first step. So go on, go on...” The busker was standing at his patch on the corner of Bath Street and Renfield Street in Eustace’s home city of Glasgow back in 1992, and the newly-graduated photographer was willing himself to cross the road and ask him to pose for a portrait. “He was ring-a-ding-dinging away and it was like a comedy sketch. I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to ask him, but what if it’s a no? Should I? What if it’s a no? Should I?’ I was going back and forward like a yo-yo, asking all these
questions and they were all negative. I was thinking of everything that could go wrong. But eventually I walked across the road, asked him and he said yes, I took the shots and then some more, and it became a body of work called The Buskers. “Fast forward 20 years and the creative director of Anthropologie sees these pictures then commissions me to photograph a road trip across the US with my then 17-year-old daughter Rachael. The point is, if I hadn’t taken that first step, none of those other
This page, clockwise from main: actor David Gant, 2003; Michael, Glasgow, 2003; plate No 8 from The Buskers series, 1992; David Eustace in Edinburgh, opposite page
things would have happened. We do things that won’t mean anything for another ten years but that’s where they come from. We do things that aren’t for tomorrow,” he says. “Nothing is going to happen unless you do something. That’s what I tell students starting out now. You don’t know what’s around the corner and it’s not always the immediate thing. Everything comes full circle.” Eustace is big on things coming full circle, and so it is that he finds himself back in Edinburgh, where he was