Tom Wood (photographer)

Thomas "Tom" Wood (born Ireland, 14 January 1951) is a street photographer, portraitist and landscape photographer based in Britain. Wood is best known for his photographs in Liverpool and Merseyside from 1978–2001, "on the streets, in pubs and clubs, markets, workplaces, parks and football grounds" of "strangers, mixed with neighbours, family and friends." His work has been published in five books, been widely shown in solo exhibitions and received awards.

The critic Sean O'Hagan has described Wood as "a pioneering colourist", "a photographer for whom there are no rules" with an "instinctive approach to photographing people up close and personal" and quotes photographer Simon Roberts saying Wood's photographs "somehow combine rawness and intimacy in a way that manages to avoid the accusations of voyeurism and intrusion that often dog work of this kind." Phill Coomes, writing for BBC News, said "wherever they were taken or made, his pictures seem always to have a trace of human existence, and at their centre they are about the lives that pass through the spaces depicted."The New Yorker's photography critic, Vince Aletti, described Wood's style as "loose, instinctive and dead-on" adding "he makes Martin Parr look like a formalist".

Wood was born and brought up in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He trained as a conceptual painter at Leicester Polytechnic from 1973–76. Extensive viewing of experimental films led him to photography, in which he is self-taught. He has explored a "multiplicity of formally divergent themes and quotations" with an approach "much more fluid than the current conventions of post-Conceptual photography or photojournalism dictate". In 1978 Wood moved to Merseyside, and in 2003 to North Wales where he works as a part-time lecturer in photography at Coleg Llandrillo Cymru.

Wood photographed mainly in Liverpool and Merseyside from 1978–2001, primarily street photography "on the streets, in pubs and clubs, markets, workplaces, parks and football grounds" of "strangers, mixed with neighbours, family and friends." At the same time he also worked on a long-term study of the landscape in the west of Ireland, North Wales and Merseyside. He has also worked with video on a daily basis since 1988, filming family life.

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