Tom Wood: Bus Odyssey

Tom Wood: Bus Odyssey
Essay by Sylvia Bohmer.

Their faces lined and weary, their clothing altered by ever-changing fashions-the people who ride buses everyday are hardly the stuff of photographs. But the pictures Tom Wood has taken during 20 years of travel on Liverpool's buses are much more than documents of mass transit in England. Rather, they transport viewers and riders alike 0n an odyssey in which the unspectacular becomes interesting. Seen only through the windows of a bus, the streets, buildings, parks, traffic, and pedestrians of Liverpool are recreated from a human and accessible perspective.The bus itself becomes a predominantly visual space, a metal box with vast areas of glass, a viewfinder that creates an inherent narrative as it moves though a city transformed into pictorial space. Wood takes us through the Merseyside of the 80s and gos on a multi-dimensional aesthetic and conceptual journey that can only be described as Joycean. Tom Wood was born in 1951 in County Mayo, Ireland, and when he was three years old his family moved t0 England. Wood has lived in the same house in Merseyside, near Liverpool, since 1978. He doesn't drive a car, so he must travel everywhere by bus.