Men and Women

Tom Wood

They say that ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ but as regards photography, do men and women really inhabit parallel worlds? For Men and Women, Tom Wood’s latest exhibition and book, Wood has chosen to separate the genders. He worked in a creative collaboration with artist Padraig Timoney, re-visiting his vast archive of images, drawing from previously unseen bodies of work along with the seminal Looking for Love, All Zones Off Peak, Football Grounds, Shipyard and Docks and Women’s Market. What emerges is a subtle new reading of his work that deals with gender alongside his other preoccupations with character and place. Displayed together without chronology, the fluid arrangement highlights the visual play between the images, as well as Wood's prolonged involvement with his subject matter.

Irish born photographer Tom Wood (b.1951) has taken photographs almost every day for the last 40 years, recording the daily lives of the people of Merseyside in their everyday environments – at work, on the bus, at the shops, at football matches, or in pubs and nightclubs. Never without his camera, and constantly moving between different photographic styles and between colour and black and white, the ‘Photie Man’ (as Wood became known locally) mixes images of strangers with portraits of family and friends. But whether or not his subjects are known to him, Wood's images forge a very human connection between the viewer and the person pictured, striking a balance between delicacy and directness. This work reflects Wood’s enrichment of the practice of street photography and the signficance of his contribution to the subjective documentary tradition as a whole.

©Brian Cegan

Photographer Tom Wood, Curator Tanya Kiang, Curator Trish Lambe & Photographer Dr. Anthony Haughey ©Brian Cegan

©Brian Cegan

Photographer Tom Wood talking about the exhibition

Tom Wood was born in Mayo, Ireland in 1951. He grew up in Cowley, Oxford and studied painting at Leicester Polytechnic. In 1978 he moved to Merseyside where he taught photography part-time while working on his projects. Various series by Wood have appeared in book form, including Photie Man (Steidl, 2005), Bus-Odyssey(Hatje Cantz, 2001), People (Wienand, 1999), All Zones off Peak (Dewi Lewis, 1998) and Looking for Love(Cornerhouse/Aperture, 1988). ‘All Zones Off Peak’ was exhibited at Gallery of Photography Ireland in 1999. Major exhibitions of his work have been held in galleries and museums including International Centre of Photography, New York; FOAM,, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; C/O, Berlin; Photographers' Gallery, London; and The National Media Museum. His work has also been exhibited in MOMA, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the V&A in London.

Photographers Tom Wood & Dr. Anthony Haughey ©Brian Cegan

©Brian Cegan

Photographers Tony O'Shea & Tom Wood

Acknowledgements This exhibition was organised as a collaboration between Gallery of Photography, Dublin and Belfast Exposed, where it will be on show from 24 January to
14 March 2014.

About the Exhibition

Tom Wood | Men and Women is supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council, and by Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council. It was first shown at The Photographers' Gallery, London in 2012 in an exhibition organised in collaboration with the National Media Musuem, Bradford. The works were included in their recent major retrospective of Wood’s Tom Wood: Photographs 1973-2013.