Tom Wood

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.