BBC News – Tom Wood’s men and women.
… To many in the business Wood is a true photographer and held in high regard. One that has dedicated his life to his art and has cut no corners nor bent to prevailing trends. He is often classified as a documentary photographer, but he tells me quite forcefully that is not the case. “I am not trying to document anything, I am asking a question. It is more about deciphering and transforming. You don’t call a poet, a documentary poet, because they write about life, so why a photographer?”
It is that exploration of the subject and what stimulated him to make a picture that is of such interest, a contest between the form and the content. “When the stuff is too journalistic and documentary then it is journalism, if it is too conceptual and arty then that is another thing, but where the two meet – that is interesting.” …
“You are after this intangible thing which is not a document. You can photograph the same face 50 times and 49 are not interesting, but one is and it goes to another place.
“I wanted to allow that time as a gestation period, each picture should be a discovery. It is about asking a question, you don’t know which are the great pictures just like that.”
INCOGNITO 