LONDON.- 101 Pictures focuses on photographer Tom Wood’s celebrated work taken in Liverpool and the Wirral between 1978 and 2001. A majority of the photographs in the book were captured within a 10 minute walk of Wood’s Wallasey home. They show the families, couples and individuals inhabiting the streets, pubs, workplaces, parks, and markets where his regular presence allowed him to become an accepted part of the social landscape. Collectively the photographs create an affectionate document of the city and her inhabitants during this period.
Drawing from different series of work, the book highlights Wood’s experimentation with various types of camera and film, print papers and textures, and demonstrates his skill as a colourist. This experimental approach was partly due to cost, as occasionally he had to use out of date film stock for his photographs, but the results show divergent visual interpretations of his subjects, and his use of medium formats reveals a wealth of visual information during the printing process.
Photographs in the book include those from his most well-known series including All Zones, Off Peak and Bus Odyssey which were shot over a period of 18 years as Wood travelled across the city by bus, usually during off-peak hours. The photographs capture a city in motion from the crowds at bus stops to the introspective passengers, and the views of the urban landscape from the elevated perspective of the bus window.
Images from Looking for Love, shot at the now demolished Chelsea Reach disco pub in New Brighton in the early 1980s, are included in the book. Photographed on busy nights, the images depict the heat and uninhibited drunken hubbub of the club’s clientele. ‘Photie Man’ was a nickname given to Wood at the club and this became the title of a book of his work published in 2005. 101 Pictures also includes less familiar work from his long term projects photographing the residents at Rainhill Hospital, the Harland and Wolf dockyard in Birkenhead alongside a few previously unpublished images from the very start of his career and later works.
The photographs in the book have been selected by Martin Parr, and it has been edited and sequenced by artist Padraig Timoney who also contributed the cover design.
Tom Wood was born in 1951 in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He lived and worked in Merseyside between 1978 and 2003, before moving to his current home in North Wales. Wood has published numerous books, including Looking for Love (1989), All Zones Off Peak (1998), Photie Man (2005) and Men / Women (2013). His work has been include in many group exhibitions, has been the subject of solo exhibitions at ICP, New York; MoMA, Oxford; FOAM, Amsterdam, The Photographers’ Gallery, London and the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford amongst others, and is held in the collections of major international museums.
