Since 1975, Tom Wood has obsessively photographed everything around him: the streets of Birkenhead, where he lives, a suburb of Liverpool, the passengers on the bus he takes daily first, to go to work, then compulsively for years, as if to satisfy his thirst for looking at the world through photography. The teenagers in the neighborhood spotted his tall figure and his camera, he was barely older than them and strolled in the same places: as a sign of trust, they gave him the nickname Photie man (“the man with the camera”)… Several photographic series developed in parallel: at night, he photographed in the popular Chelsea Reach nightclub and grouped the images in what would be his first book Looking for Love; during the day, he photographs the streets of Liverpool, bus trips, the Saturday morning market, the stadium area on match days... So many photographic projects made of meticulous observation, obstinacy, accumulation, which paint an implicit portrait of a city subject to a complex reality. Tom Wood takes the ferry every day, not as a peaceful traveler, but as a discreet researcher, a sensitive observer who takes a tender and sincere look at the daily life that plays out before him. He does not work for the press, does not carry out orders. He is not passing through, he lives here and you can feel it. He is not interested in the strangeness or exoticism of his models, does not seek to reveal a particular or spectacular character that would be visible at first glance, as a Martin Parr might do at the same moment, a few kilometers away. At no point do his subjects become grotesque or caricatured. He lives here, among them, with them, and photographs in a very instinctive way, as if to be in tune with the world. His images are of great formal freedom, freeing themselves from the conventional codes of photography, composition, color, framing... No exercises in style or artifice, few anecdotes: portraits, crowds, bodies, captured in a strong and agreed relationship between the photographer and the model. What might these characters be thinking in transit? Sometimes serene or pensive, they are immersed in an individual reality that resists photography. Even the documentary character of a working class that is nevertheless mistreated only appears on a second reading of the images: “I am not trying to document or prove anything. I'm interested in how life works and how photography works. I am a researcher with a camera, in search of what I know and what escapes me…” TEXT BY PAUL FARLEY