MEET THE CURATOR

from YM Liverpool June 2023

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Aside from the fact that 2023 marks 50 years since Tom began practising photography, why was now the right time for his exhibition?

Since Tom left Merseyside in 2003, he’s had the opportunity to look back over his whole body of work and make sense of it in a way that only time can allow you to do. With a bit of distance and space from [the work], you can understand, conceptually, what was going on, and what Tom was looking to do. I think the timing of the show gives us an insight into Tom’s overall ambition, beyond capturing the specifics in the moment.

How involved was Tom with putting the show together?

Tom has been heavily involved. The show started, in some ways, about 12 years ago, when I first met Tom, and we began talking about doing something. There was an ambition early on to do a bigger exhibition of his work than ever before and as Tom has said, to “give the work back to the city”.

It was always my hope that we would go beyond the projects which had gone before and beyond the established lexicon of images that are associated with Tom and see the work that hadn’t been shown. That required a lot of involvement from Tom! We spent probably the last year going through 10s of 1000s of images to get to the final selection that you see here.

Do you feel there is a particular narrative which runs through the exhibition?

I think what the show partly does is speak about intention. There’s a beautiful poem called ‘The Hospital’ by Patrick Kavanagh, a line of which Tom’s used for a book and also as the title of the exhibition’s final section called ‘Snatch out of time the passionate transitory’. I think that’s very much what these pictures are – a snatch out of time.

There is something very everyday about them, there is something that speaks to the language of social media and phones on our cameras. But actually, I think some of these images you might take and delete because social media is quite polished, especially nowadays.

So, in some ways, I think this exhibition might make us question the idea of perfection and the way that we use filters. Tom has never been afraid to challenge conventions around photography and to embrace blurring and movement and things being off centre, and not perfectly composed.

I think what’s also really interesting is to see physical photos because the Instagram account for Tom’s archive is really popular but with social media everything’s got to be flattened into a grid. When you come into this exhibition, and you see the variety of scale, you realise how much we lose just by looking at pictures on our phone and the presence that the physical picture has.

These are pictures that anyone could take but no one thinks to take. If you look back to your family albums, you rightly have the weddings, the christenings and the birthday parties, but no one thinks to document the way out of the Seacombe Ferry terminal!

Did Tom ask permission before taking each picture?

It’s a mix. Some of the pictures are what we call street portraits – an unplanned portrait, but Tom’s obviously asked if he can take the picture. But there’s also the more candid portraiture, where he snaps someone without saying explicitly, ‘can I take your picture?’

But I think what’s true with all of Tom’s work is that as he photographed in these places over such an extended period that people knew he was there and started to ignore him and went about their business. There was a kind of unspoken sort of permission, people knew what was happening. But when he was at the markets, he used to go around really early just to reassure everyone that he wasn’t there from the benefits office!

Do you have a favourite image from the exhibition?

There is a picture of my dad’s cousin in here so I should probably say that! But there’s too many. I do love ‘Girl At Slot Machine’ and the Great Homer Street Market image of a girl pushing a pram with her toddler in it and she’s holding a balloon, which is very pretty. Tom kept telling me that I had really quirky taste and that I was putting in pictures which maybe weren’t that accessible or weren’t that obvious. But I loved some of the more abstract ones where Tom’s pushing the idea of what a photograph can be.

Tickets for Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood are on sale now. For further details and to book, visit: liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ tomwood black oversized square frame sunglasses