insights into photography
One of the most important things to do as a photographer is to work on projects, to work to themes. This means looking for similar subject matter or returning to the same locations to photograph over a period of time. It is this that trains the eye and develops the understanding of the subject and makes images that have more than just snap value. I teach this on our Intermediate Photography course and see great results from our students and such progress in their work.
There is a new exhibition by Tom Wood of a project that he has worked on for more than 40 years.
Phil Coomes on the BBC website looks at Tom’s work and discusses the process and results, it is well worth a read here
How long does it take for a body of work to be ready? A decade, more? Well, for photographer Tom Wood it seems that 40 years is about right.
Men and women is a new show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London which brings together Wood’s pictures of the everyday lives of the people of Liverpool and Merseyside between 1973 and the start of this century.
Wood’s method of working was simple. For five days of the week he’d shoot on the streets, or from a bus, and was soon known by those he saw regularly as Photieman.
“I was making pictures, with people that allowed me to photograph them,” says Wood. “I was just going out and making pictures every day on loads of things all at once and never finished anything. Lots of the projects I didn’t want to finish or to put in to the world at that time.”
The resulting pictures would be filed away, each one contributing to different projects that over the years built in to substantial bodies of work MORE from Phil Coomes here
Right Here, 1990
Mad Max, 1993
The exhibition of this work is The Photographers’ Gallery, London Admission Free, 12 October 2012 – 6 January 2013
This is from the gallery’s site
Irish born photographer Tom Wood (b. 1951) has, for the last four decades, continuously recorded the daily lives of the people of Liverpool and the Merseyside area – at the football ground and markets, on the bus and the ferry, in pubs and nightclubs, workplaces, schools and hospitals.
Never seen without his camera, and constantly moving between different formats and photographic styles, colour and black and white, Wood readily mixes images of strangers with portraits of family and friends. His work, although documentary in its approach, is much more fluid than that – an exploration of the medium of photography as much as a celebration of the city of Liverpool and its inhabitants.
This first major solo exhibition of Tom Wood’s work in the UK focuses on previously unseen portraits dating from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. The exhibition also features some of Wood’s rarely seen book dummies – including Looking for Love (1989), All Zones off Peak (1998) and Photieman, (2005) – as well as a selection of vintage work prints, giving an overview of his important publishing output and an insight into his working methods.
Wood has exhibited internationally including at the ICP, New York; the Shanghai Arts Biennale; FOAM, Amsterdam; and the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and his work is held in major national and international collections. He lives and works in Wales. MORE INFORMATION HERE
Last night in our Portrait class a student was concerned that using his 85mm f1.2 meant he sometimes focussed in the wrong place, I suggested that f1.2 might be just too shallow for a portrait photograph that captures a face and this started a discussion as to where one should focus. I maintained that the eyes are the most important in a portrait but, rightly, others said sometimes there are other aspects of a face, or in fact the portrait, that one might want to highlight. I said there is now a camera that you can focus after having taken the picture. This brought amazement and scepticism. The sceptical aspects were surely a photographer should know where they want to focus before pressing the shutter, personally I agree with this thought, and that how can a camera do this. I promised to find information on this. I have posted on the Lytro before here and here but this time I found a new article, that explains how the Lytro is going to allow manual settings, seems weird when everything else is automatic, but what is really interesting on this site is that it allows you to re-focus images on the site itself so you can see how the process works. Go and have a play.
Do I care about this stuff, no not one bit, this is not photography as I have known it for decades, the making of decisions at the point of capture is fundamental to me but then I am old, how about you, not are you old, but what do you think about the making of images. Can everything be Instagramed to make it interesting afterwards, perhaps I should put interesting in quote marks. If I see another ‘creative’ filter applied to a crap picture to make it ‘interesting’ I might explode, now that would be worth photographing
Oxford School of Photography 