Bøger af Tom Wood

Claptrap is a grand satire of the colonial mentality that governs the theatre festivals of Canada.

Beginning in 1985 the Manchester-based Documentary Photography Archive (DPA) commissioned photographers to record aspects of British society in the north of England. Tom Wood's The DPA Work explores the life and demise of two major institutions near Liverpool, Rainhill Psychiatric Hospital and Cammell Laird shipyard.Opened in 1851 as a lunatic asylum for long-term patients, by 1936 Rainhill was the largest hospital complex in Europe. Wood began photographing there in the 1980s when UK government policy had shifted from institutions towards "Care in the Community." By then Rainhill had diminished in size and wards were often combined, mixing a range of patients. The DPA and the mental-health charity Mind, which described conditions at Rainhill as "wholly unacceptable," asked Wood to record the hospital's closure and the movement of its patients into the community.Cammell Laird shipyard's illustrious history dates back to the 1820s, and includes the building of many famous warships and aircraft carriers such as HMS Ark Royal. When Wood photographed the yard it was facing closure, with a demoralized workforce fighting to save their jobs while HMS Unicorn, the last Upholder-class submarine, was being completed and launched.The two main volumes of The DPA Work include archive material related to the history of Rainhill and Cammell Laird, while a third book features a series of late nineteenth-century photographs of patients at Rainhill. Together these volumes document a time of upheaval in Liverpool in the midst of industrial decline, the breakdown of communities and changes in healthcare whose consequences are still felt today.Co-published with the University of Chester

These three volumes of Tom Wood's new work, Landscapes, are drawn from the artist's extensive unseen and unpublished landscape work. The first volume concentrates on Wood's photographs made in response to the West of Ireland, County Mayo, the landscape of his birthplace and childhood and an area he has returned to as an artist almost every year since 1975. Taken over decades, views of this wild and remote landscape, many of them glimpsed from the car, bus or train during his journeys there, are combined with fragile fragments of surviving family photographs, video stills, and intimate and affectionate portraits of day-to-day life within a rural community.The second volume consists of Wood's landscapes predominantly made within Merseyside, where he lived and worked for 25 years, from 1978-2003. In this more urban environment, his landscapes encompass pictures of people's homes and gardens, parks, wastelands, and the river Mersey. Wood moved to Wales in 2003 to address what he has referred to as "the matter of landscape." His open and experimental approach to photography means he is constantly pushing its formal and conceptual possibilities.Selected from the photographs he has been making in Wales, the third volume is the most formally abstract of the three books and includes many photographs taken with a panoramic camera - complex, optically rich pictures with multiple points of view and focus.