Thomas "Tom" Wood is a street photographer

Street photography

Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and other settings....

 working in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, particularly Merseyside

Merseyside

Merseyside is a metropolitan county in North West England, with a population of 1,365,900. It encompasses the metropolitan area centred on both banks of the lower reaches of the Mersey Estuary, and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wirral, and the city of Liverpool...

 (1978–2001). He has had solo shows, and his work has been collected in five books.

Practice

Although Wood photographed working class Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

 exclusively for many years, his primary interest is not documentary

Documentary photography

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle significant and historical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit...

. Trained as a painter at the conceptually

Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

 orientated Leicester Polytechnic from 1973–76, his first exploration of lens-based media was through extensive viewing of experimental film

Experimental film

Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...

s. His photography has explored a "multiplicity of formally divergent themes and quotations" his approach "much more fluid than the current conventions of post-Conceptual photography or photojournalism dictate" He has worked with colour negative film continuously since 1976, while often using both black and white and colour in different locations.

Books of photographs

The pictures in his first book, Looking For Love (1989) were made between 1982 and 1985, and features the infamous Chelsea Reach nightclub. This was followed by the highly acclaimed All Zones Off Peak (1998) featuring pictures resulting from spending eighteen years riding the buses of Liverpool during his 1978 to 1996 ‘bus odyssey’ - the images selected from 100,000 negatives. The book People followed this in 1999, and the major retrospective book Photie Man made in collaboration with Irish artist Padraig Timoney, was published in 2005.

Featured works and awards

His work is also included in the revised edition of Bystander: the History of Street Photography (2001) and his book All Zones Off Peak featured in The Photo Book: A History vol.2 (2006). Wood received the "Terence Donovan Award" from the Royal Photographic Society

Royal Photographic Society

The Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...

 in 1998 and the "Prix Dialogue de l’Humanite" at Les Recontres d’Arles, France in 2002.

Other work

Wood has worked with video on a daily basis since 1988, filming family life. He has also made landscape pictures since the 1970s in the west of Ireland. He moved to North Wales in 2003.

List of works

Books and Catalogues

• Photie Man, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2005
• Not Only Female…, Exhib. Cat, Schaden, Cologne, Germany, 2004
• Bus Odyssey, Hajte Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2001
• Tom Wood, Galerie im Buergerhaus Neunkirchen/Saar, Germany Exhib Cat. 2000
• People, Wienand Verlag, Cologne, Germany, 1999
• All Zones off Peak, Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, UK, 1998
• Looking for Love, Cornerhouse, Manchester 1989

Public Collections

• The International Centre of Photography, New York
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• The Art Institute of Chicago
• The National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen
• Stadtische Galerie, Wolfsburg
• National Media Museum, Bradford
• The Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Exhibitions

• 2006 The Approach, London
• 2005 Le Chateau d’Eau, Toulouse, France; Foam Museum, Amsterdam; Musee de l’Elysee, Lucanne, Switzerland (with Larry Sultan); The National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark
• 2004 Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany; Centre de la Photographie, Geneva; Le Centre Cultural Suisse, Paris (Paris Photo)
• 2003 C/O, Berlin, Germany
• 2002 Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, Germany; Stadtische Galerie, Wolfsburg; Kunsthalle, Wilhelmshaven
• 2001 Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany
• 2000 Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Galerie im Buergerhaus, Neunkirchen/Saar; Kunstverein, Ulm, Germany
• 1999 Galerie Albrecht, Munich; Gallery of Photography, Dublin
• 1998 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Galerie F.M. Schwartz/Photokina, Cologne
• 1996 International Centre of Photography, New York; Galerie du Jour Agnes b., Paris.

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 2008 ParrWorld, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Baby, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam
• 2007 How We Are: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, London; Centre of the Creative Universe, Liverpool and the Avant-Garde, Tate Gallery Liverpool; On View, Photo London, Old Billingsgate, London
• 2006 HyperDesign, Shanghai Biennale, China; Closed Eyes, Museum for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark; Shrinking Cities, Pratt Manhattan Gallery/Van Alen Institute, New York; People and Places, Museum of Modern Art, New York; La Boum II, Sies+ Hoke Galerie, Dusseldof
• 2005 24 x 36, Leica Gallery, New York
• 2004 Wirklich Wahr! Realitatsvesprechen von Fotographien, Ruhrlandmuseum, Essen; Ruestrassen; Schrumpfende Stadte, Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Sammlung Kunne, Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany; Relating To Photography, FFi – Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt; Street Life, Rotonda Galerie, Cologne; Independents 04, Liverpool Biennial, UK Native Land, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno & Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
• 2003 Garry Winogrand and Tom Wood, Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne; We go round and round…, COMME CA Gallery, New York; Sad Beautiful Life, C/O Berlin, Germany; L’amour Toujours, galerieXprssns, Hamburg
• 2002 Becks Futures, ICA, London; Zipp, Kassler Kunstverein, Kassel
• 2001 The Sidewalk Never Ends, Art Institute of Chicago, USA
• 2000 Les Photographies Collectionnees par agnes b, Centre National de la Photographie, Paris
• 1999 Internationale Fototage, Herten, Germany
• 1996 Blindspot, Paolo Baldicci Gallery, New York; Inside Out, Galerie du Jour Agnes b., Paris (with Richard Billingham and Paul Seawright)
• 1994 Street Photography, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

External links

• http://www.issuemagazine.com/i8tomwoodinterview.html
• Article search on Art Forum