Tom Wood, the photographer Martin Parr hailed in 1998 as “a little-known genius of British photography,” is Irish by birth and has spent most of his life in Liverpool.
Nicknamed on the street “Photie Man”*—the guy with the camera—so completely did he and his Leica become part of Liverpool’s everyday scene, the artist has, since the mid-1970s, roamed every corner of his adopted city on foot or by bus. That bus is a vehicle central to his vision, as his books Bus Odyssey and All Zones Off Peak attest.
For almost thirty years the street was the stage for his photographic explorations. Nourished by daily life, this work sits at the crossroads of documentary, lived experience, and visual inquiry. Shot mostly on a Leica and alternating between colour and black-and-white, the images reveal the complicity he enjoys with his subjects. He is one of them, lives as they do, disappears among them. “He reaches the intimate because he does not violate intimacy,” freeing himself from photographic constraints and embracing true visual liberty.
Together with Martin Parr, Chris Killip, and a few other peers, Tom Wood played a major role in the wave of English social photography that emerged after the punk explosion in reaction to the Thatcher years.
* Liverpool slang for “the guy with the camera.”
