Tom Wood

These three volumes of Tom Wood's new work, Landscapes, are drawn from the artist's extensive unseen and unpublished landscape work. The first volume concentrates on Wood's photographs made in response to County Mayo in the west of Ireland--the landscape of his birthplace and childhood and an area he has returned to as an artist almost every year since 1975. Taken over decades, views of this wild and remote landscape--many of them glimpsed from the car, bus or train during his journeys there--are combined with fragile fragments of surviving family photographs, video stills, and intimate and affectionate portraits of day-to-day life within a rural community. The second volume consists of Wood's landscapes predominantly made within Merseyside, where he lived and worked for 25 years, from 1978–2003. In this more urban environment, his landscapes encompass pictures of people's homes and gardens, parks, wastelands and the river Mersey. Wood moved to Wales in 2003 to address what he has referred to as the matter of landscape. His open and experimental approach to photography means he is constantly pushing its formal and conceptual possibilities. Selected from the photographs he has been making in Wales, the third volume is the most formally abstract of the three books and includes many photographs taken with a panoramic camera--complex, optically rich pictures with multiple points of view and focus.

Before moving to North Wales in 2003, Tom Wood had been photographing the people of his Liverpool neighborhood for almost three decades. In these two volumes, Wood displays carefully edited photographs taken from his archives filled with artistic chronicles of the lives of men and women. Even though the pictures are not presented in a chronological order, Men and Women ends up being a book saturated with history, showing Liverpool in transition from its industrial past. Never seen without his camera, and constantly moving between different formats and photographic styles, color and black and white, the Photie Man (as Wood became known locally and as his last book with Steidl was titled) readily mixes images of strangers with portraits of family and friends.

Their faces lined and weary, their clothing altered by ever-changing fashions--the people who ride buses everyday are hardly the stuff of photographs. But the pictures Tom Wood has taken during 20 years of travel on Liverpool's buses are much more than documents of mass transit in England. Rather, they transport viewers and riders alike on an odyssey in which the unspectacular becomes interesting. Seen only through the windows of a bus, the streets, buildings, parks, traffic, and pedestrians of Liverpool are recreated from a human and accessible perspective. The bus itself becomes a predominantly visual space, a metal box with vast areas of glass, a viewfinder that creates an inherent narrative as it moves though a city transformed into pictorial space.