photie man

“I’m Exploring Life”: 50 Years of Tom Wood’s Photos of Britain

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Lime Street, Lives Passing By. Photo: Tom Wood

Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of Wood, who is one of Britain’s most important image-makers. “It was something I wanted to do for the city,” Wood says. “The work was made here and I’ve had big shows all over the world; Moscow, France, China even, but not Liverpool.”

Wood’s images have until recently been more embraced by publishers and gallerists internationally. In the UK, he has sometimes been pigeonholed as a “documentarian of working-class Liverpool” rather than as a visual artist who creates striking, moving images that make people stop in their tracks, one of the issues being perhaps a middle-class dominated art sector struggling to grasp that working-class people could make and be the subject of great art without it needing to be social comment.

Boy with Fish, Secombe Docks 1980. Photo: Tom Wood.

“That lack of interest in Britain for a long time, it’s definitely partly a class thing. How I present myself but also the way photography is reviewed in a class way. ‘Not proper art’ and so on,” he says. For Wood, the contest between form and content was something interesting: “I thought a lot of stuff at art school, especially the conceptual stuff, was not real enough. It was like a game,” he says. “When I went out on the streets at the weekend, what I saw was more real and more interesting, but not in a documentary sense. I’m exploring my medium for sure, I’m an artist, but I’m exploring life as well.”

This expansive show features over 500 pictures, surveying his whole career, from images of his native Ireland and Leicester where he studied, to his current home in Wales and found photographs Wood collected as a young man. The largest element though are his photographs of Merseyside, where he lived for over two decades. One of Wood’s aims for the exhibition is to reconnect with some of the people he captured over the years and photograph them again. “That’s half the reason I have done the show,” he says. “To make that connection. You can leave details if you know people in the show.”

Lads at Railing, Scotland Road, 1987. Photo: Tom Wood.

The exhibition’s title comes from the nickname Wood was given in Merseyside as he became so familiar photographing the same communities repeatedly and building a reciprocal relationship with them. “I couldn’t do it otherwise,” he says. This extended even to taking wedding pictures for some of his subjects. Part of the power of his images perhaps comes from this deep familiarity. “Richard Feynman said he would not understand the real physics of a system until he had painstakingly isolated and calculated all the forces,” Wood says. “This is what I would tell myself as I was photographing the same subject year after year – whether it be women at the market, men at the football.”

Image from Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Robin Clewley

Has looking back on his vast archive for this show changed his views on it? “Yeah, that’s the thing about photography. It’s not fixed, and life is not fixed. Things change, how it’s read changes,” he says. Not least a culture sector that now values photography, and this kind of subject matter, more. In the 90s, Wood managed to get an Arts Council grant after receiving a letter of support from Lee Friedlander. “It said ‘wonderful pictures. As good a set of pictures you see every five or ten years,’” only for Wood to then struggle to find anywhere to show the work. Does he feel vindicated by the growing interest from all quarters? He has three books due out this year alone. “A little bit,” he says. “Having Friedlander on board kept me going for a few years. A lot of people have supported the work over the years, not least the people in the pictures.”

Image from Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Robin Clewley

“There’s something about the work that people from all over the globe connect to,” Wood says. “It’s very strange. I’m not impressive as a person. I think the work itself, or maybe Liverpool, maybe the people, I don’t know. But it does connect with people.” 

Image from Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Robin Clewley

This piece was published by AnOther magazine in June 2023.

Every Man and Woman is a Star

Kenn Taylor

Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 20 May 2023 – 7 Jan 2024

Photo: Robin Clewley

By Kenn Taylor

Even if you’ve not heard of Tom Wood, the photographer now subject to a huge retrospective at the Walker, you’re likely to have come across his images: young sharply-dressed folks confidently posing for the camera; dancers lit up by flash in an 1980s nightclub; a grandparent and child clinging to each other as they stare through a bus window.

Wood hails from County Mayo, in Ireland, and he’s exhibited everywhere from the USA to the Netherlands, China to France. Yet, as he’s best known for his images of Merseyside, it’s fitting this — the most comprehensive show of his work ever — should be staged in Liverpool.

Born in 1951, Wood moved from Ireland to Cowley, Oxford at a young age with his family. After working in a tax office and the local car factory, he was encouraged to take up art and studied painting in Leicester from 1973-76. He borrowed a camera, initially to record his paintings, and began to experiment with the medium that would dominate his creative life.

‘NTLEMAN. Photo: Tom Wood

The first gallery in the Walker show, ‘The 1970s’, covers Wood’s earliest work, much of it black and white. Even in these first pictures, his talent for capturing people’s character in a single shot is evident. ‘NTLEMAN’, featuring two young women posing beneath a broken sign for the men’s toilets, was taken by Wood in Cowley in 1973 on the second ever roll of film he shot; it remains one of his most well-known works. His ability is evident even in the small, now discoloured, prints from a season he spent working as a holiday camp photographer.

The second gallery, ‘The 1980s’, marks Wood’s move to Liverpool in 1978 after gaining employment as a technician in the School of Art (now LJMU). This period saw him starting to also work in colour, in works such as in ‘Not Miss New Brighton’ from 78-79. Colour was then still considered suspect in the world of ‘art’ photography, but Wood has said it was always important to him. 

Not Miss New Brighton. Photo: Tom Wood

This, the largest gallery, contains some of Wood’s most well-known works from the 25 years he then spent living in and continually photographing Merseyside. While his images of cocky lads like ‘Mark and the gang’ and ‘Lads at railing, Scotland Road’ are some of the best photographs of that aspect of the area’s culture, unlike many image makers who briefly descend on Merseyside with only stereotypes in mind, Wood captures a much more diverse range of people and places across the region, from the sparkling ‘Furcoatsisters’ to the serious and proud-looking ‘The Staff of Secombe Café’ to the even more proud and pleased ‘Couple with new baby (actually first day out without the baby)’ and the 80s alternative fashions of ‘Mike and Kerrie — Every Man and Woman is a Star’.

Couple with new baby (actually first day without the baby) Photo: Tom Wood

The exhibition’s title reflects the fact that Wood became known as ‘the photie man’ in the area, a figure so familiar that people willingly posed for him or at least didn’t bat an eyelid when he was snapping away. Wood offered prints to many of his subjects and took pictures at local weddings and christenings, charging only for the price of the film, all of which helped him to develop an important reciprocal relationship with his subjects. Some of Wood’s most evocative images, like ‘Seaview Cafe (Not many Saturdays off)’ from 1984 are of families on days out in New Brighton. The openness people display within Wood’s viewfinder speaks time and again to an ease and familiarity between photographer and subject.

Some of Tom Wood nightclub images from the exhibition. Photo: Robin Clewley

The pictures he took in New Brighton’s nightclubs, candidly capturing those fleeting moments of flirtation, rejection, humour and introspection, were facilitated by Wood being a regular face in those clubs. These images received international acclaim when they were published in 1989 as the photobook Looking for Love. His ‘Untitled (sea of bodies, Grand Hotel, New Brighton)’ almost elevates the scene of a packed nightclub to the level of an epic history painting. And in All Zones Off Peak, the photographs Wood took on his innumerable bus journeys around the region have a powerful quality of light, such as ‘Towards Netherton’ and ‘Vauxhall Circular’, in which the red hair of the subject is echoed by a touch of sunlight on the seat fabric. 

Towards Netherton. Photo: Tom Wood

Wood rarely undertook commissions, but two that he did take on resulted in some of his most poignant images. For these he entered two closed worlds in Merseyside, Birkenhead’s Cammell Laird shipyard and the large psychiatric hospital at Rainhill, photographing the end of these institutions in their original form. Wood’s recurring theme of the space between generations comes across more powerfully in his Laird’s images. Picturing the yard’s last batch of young apprentices and an older man at the same workbench used by his father before him, Wood captures them all facing uncertainty as the endpoint is reached of nearly 200 years of employment and social structure.

From the Cammell Laird series. Photo: Tom Wood

The images from Rainhill Hospital are prudently placed in a discreet area of the gallery. All these photographs were taken with permission from patients or their families. Most of the residents are older and, while the majority should have never been institutionalised, Wood depicts them also facing an uncertain future as the place that in some cases they’d known for most of their lives closes around them. Wood was contracted to take pictures at Rainhill for six weeks; he ended up engaging with the community there for two years.

The final gallery contains Wood’s work from 2003 onwards, when he had left Merseyside and moved to Wales. While his scenes of village and town life in Wales and his native Ireland have a similar tone to that of his Merseyside work, Wood’s panoramic landscapes from the period have an expansiveness which contrasts with the intimacy of his portraits. Yet they still evidence a strong eye for detail, as in the tractors rendered tiny by the imposing landscape of ‘Moon Moving Over Iron Age Farming’ from 2006.

Loggerheads Clifftop, Towards Moel Famau, 2010. Photo: Tom Wood

Surrounded by the varied images of the exhibition, some words keep coming back. Words like strength and dignity. Humour too, his work isn’t po-faced, nor overly sentimental. Wood’s images are inherently about the variety and commonality of the human experience. Youth and age. Passion and boredom. Waiting for a bus or to be served a hotdog made epic.

The exhibition’s concluding section includes ‘The Hospital’, a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, which Wood says reflects some of what motivates his work. Its closing lines are:

For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap, 

Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

Tom Wood is undoubtedly one of the most respected and important visual artists to have been based in Merseyside in the past fifty years. The region is lucky to have had a photographer of such powerful talent capture its life over a couple of decades, reflecting Merseyside in artworks that have resonated around the world. At the show’s exit, Wood acknowledges his indebtedness to all those who appeared before his camera and inspired him to create these photographs.

Photo: Robin Clewley

After all, to borrow from one his titles, in Wood’s images, every man and woman (and child) is a star.

This piece was published by the Liverpool Post in June 2023.