Tom WOOD

Tom Wood, a photographer whom Martin Parr described in 1998 as “the unsung genius of British photography”, is originally from Ireland and has spent most of his life in Liverpool.
Known by the public as the “Photie Man “* (the guy with the camera) so much so that he and his camera have become part of the Liverpool landscape. The artist has been crisscrossing the smallest corners of his city on foot or by bus since the mid-1970s. The latter is the constitutive means of locomotion of his photography as his books “Bus Odyssey” and “All Zones off Peak” testify.

For almost thirty years, the street has been the framework of his photographic research.
This work, nourished by his daily life, is situated between documentary, life experience and visual research. His images, mostly taken with his Leica, alternating color and black and white, reveal the complicity he has with his subjects. He is one of them, lives like them, blends in with them. “He touches the intimate because he does not attack intimacy”, freeing himself from photographic constraints and authorizing himself a true visual freedom.

With Martin Parr, Chris Killip and a few others of the same generation, Tom Wood has largely contributed to the English social photography movement that has developed following the punk explosion in reaction to the Thatcher years.