Tom Wood What Do Artists Do All Day?

TRADITIONAL FIDDLE MUSIC PLAYS

Photography works in lots of different ways.

It's like infinite and I'm still exploring all that,

that's my job, that's what I do.

I was always on the street taking pictures and kids got to know me.

They would always be saying, "Take our picture."

I became known as photie man, because I was the one who took the photies.

I know this book's going to happen

and I'd like one more shot to do a sustained amount of work in Ireland.

Just to photograph solidly, to try and pull loose ends together.

We're at the farmers' mart in Ballina now,

which is the biggest town, probably, in Mayo.

How will I get it to you? If I leave it in the mart?

You're going to come back in the spring?

-Yeah.

-They'll give it to you, won't they?

-Well, God bless you.

Certainly, the older farmers still have one foot in the old ways.

They're disappearing and their... Whatever the spirit is about them,

um, I'd like to catch a bit of that.

In fact, you know, I don't think...

In a way that wasn't a cliched documentary shot.

I'm interested, I suppose... There's a fellow now coming through the door,

who's maybe 75, with a stick.

He's speaking to some of the other farmers.

My response would be to get up and take a picture of him.

Don't be taking a photograph of me!

So, there you go.

That's the situation where we are strangers and the guy walks in,

and says, "Don't take pictures of me."

That's how it was in the shipyard.

I ended up going there for maybe nearly two years, one or two days a week.

No one paid me, really.

I'd wear the same old clothes, I wouldn't shave,

I would just blend in and be part of it.

You'd go back week after week

and, eventually, you're part of the scene.

And the way I work is I just do it and get to know people

and go back over and over again, so that wouldn't happen.

More importantly, I'll be less self-conscious, because I'd go there

and this is what I do, I'd bring pictures back and get to know people.

And, you know, just the eye contact,

the rapport with people, is always interesting.

-What nationality are you?

-I'm Irish, I was born here.

-Are you?

-I was born near Crossmolina.

-You don't speak Irish.

-I know.

-I had an Irish accent...

-You speak like you're a Norwegian.

Like a Norwegian, yeah, probably. LAUGHTER

So I had an Irish accent when I was a boy, for sure.

I had a Catholic mother and Protestant father

and we ended up going to England. I always came back every summer for the holidays and took pictures.

-And now they're going to make a book.

-I'm 98.

-You're not!

-I am 98.

-And, er...

-CAMERA CLICKS

LAUGHTER Wasn't that fantastic?

I knew when you went past, he was the right man for you.

Unbelievable.

The older I've got, I'd say the more pictures I take

and the easier it is to do it.

So when I was stood up there with the auctioneer,

I know which lens I've got on there.

All the time, the camera is just down here at my waist or at my chest,

I'm still taking pictures. If I raise it to my eye, that might change the situation,

But all those little gestures and stuff that's going on between those guys, I'm interested in that,

so it could be there in one frame, the way the eye looks up to the auctioneer.

Those little things. That's a kind of dance thing you're doing.

I can make 50 pictures around an interesting scene

and 48 are OK, have interesting things with them,

but don't live, don't work.

But one or two may... You know, something else happens.

I could easily come here every week for years, easily.

And give something back, as well, in the end, that would be great.

MUSIC: "That's Entertainment" by The Jam

Because I didn't drive, I spent a lot of time on buses every day.

By way of exploring Merseyside, I would take pictures.

So I began that in 1978 and carried on doing it until I left Merseyside.

So that's like over 20 years of pictures.

You couldn't jump off the bus and ask someone's permission,

so you just had to take it.

That's all part of the learning process of doing candid pictures.

You're moving along a very fast, it's fractions of seconds

and think about it, it's gone.

I used outdated cine film, because it was very cheap.

From about 1989, I used all colour.

I spend my life doing that, that's just normal.

Sometimes it's two hours, or whatever.

The journey becomes part of the working process.

You get off somewhere and you've already been working

and that momentum carries you through the day.

And you do the same on the way back.

Off to Hickson's, the oldest drapery store in Crossmolina.

I've been going in there for years, taking pictures in there.

I remember this store when I was a child and coming back

-and going in here and buying stuff.

-Yeah.

-Then, when I came back first in 1975...

-Oh, yes.

-..I met Tom Hickson and he was just such an interesting character.

Oh, very much, yeah.

He had all this wonderful... This wonderful shop full of clothes

that seemed to go back 50 years.

I couldn't find maybe something that would suit me, be correct.

He would disappear upstairs and come down with, like, three versions of whatever it was.

I don't expect anything here, Geraldine, but, over the years,

I always said - I said to you about Mr Hickson - I'd love to look

upstairs, where he used to go and bring all this stuff down.

I'm sure it's just empty up there and you wouldn't want me to look, but I'd love to look up there.

-It's, um, it's just in very bad condition at the moment.

-I'm sure.

-You know, because I don't use that part.

-Is there anything up there?

I'd just love to see. Can I go and look without a camera?

-Just leave the camera and have a look?

-I suppose you could.

Now, look at this. This is unbelievable. This is it.

This is just amazing. This is a piece of art in itself, this one shop.

Just looking there. Those bunch of shoes over there is incredible.

In the other rooms... You wouldn't believe what's in the other rooms.

Everywhere here is just... It's great. It's really good.

Just as exciting as the landscape outside.

It's amazing to be up here, after all these years.

I can't believe this.

It's, er... Everywhere,

every arrangement, looks like I should be taking a picture of it.

I'd gladly spend a whole week in here.

But, for now, I'm kind of making notes.

I'd worry something might happen and I couldn't get back in here,

so I would photograph what I can.

It's just a great place.

And, in fact, I liked Mr Hickson so much, to come up here

and see all this stuff is really sad, but, at the same time, I don't know....

I'm...

I think it's amazing. I've been to places like this for so many years.

Someone would emigrate and you'd see this empty house

in the middle of nowhere, full of all this stuff that no one wanted.

And I've photographed those kind of places a lot.

Normally, when I'd work in somewhere like this,

I would use a medium format or large format professional camera on a tripod,

so I'd get more detail, more tonal range, all of those kind of things.

When I met my old friend Martin Parr the first time, he said, um...

He said he was a documentary photographer

and if he got a good picture, it was a bonus.

I said, "Martin, I'm interested in good pictures.

"If it's a document, it's a bonus."

This is material to explore the medium with.

SHE LAUGHS

I can't believe he's so excited! Really.

I lived in this one small place called New Brighton,

across the River Mersey from Liverpool.

And one of the places I always went to was a market outside of town

and, because it was out of town, there was no kind of false, you know...

People would be in there curlers, just really natural.

I went every Saturday

and tried to photograph these women, week after week, month after month.

Catching the women, looking them in the eye, it seemed like a natural connection.

But... I did openly. I never used to longer lens and hid behind a lamp post.

It was always a wide-angle lens and I'm really close to them.

There's a picture called Three Wise Women, which was made

not at the women's market, but a car-boot sale.

I'd go there every Sunday morning.

I had a mate who used to go there to buy stuff

and we would leave about half past five.

I'd be on the gates - people came in - to tell them

I wasn't Trading Standards, I wasn't, you know, DHSS,

I was just doing this project for myself.

So they wouldn't be scared and worried when they saw me later.

-It's a heavy one.

-That's a bit better, I think.

CAMERA CLICK

For me to take pictures, most of the time, is easy and natural

and good fun.

When I'm out working, I'll have the camera on my shoulder, if it's large format,

or ready in my hand to use.

Otherwise, if it's in a bag and you take a lens cap off and stuff,

you think, "That's not interesting, I won't bother."

The key thing is to just have a go.

You start and that involves decisions and processes.

One decision leads to another and, suddenly, you might get a good picture.

Other people have spoken about how photography is the easiest of art forms.

Maybe that makes it the hardest.

But it's easy to get a good picture.

The second roll of film I ever shot was my best-selling picture

and I still like the picture.

We're in a little town called Ballycastle on the west of Ireland

and there's an art centre here.

This is my little studio and I'm working on this Irish book,

pictures which go back to the '70s.

I lived here till I was about three years old, we emigrated

and came back every summer and I spent most of my holidays here.

And then it was only when I came back as an art student in '75,

I suddenly saw the whole place freshly. I began taking pictures.

Now, 40 years later, unbelievably,

the whole lot is being made into a book.

Alongside a book about Wales, North Wales,

where I lived for ten years, and a book about Liverpool.

The theme, I thought, was landscape.

But now I see all this Irish stuff here

and there are so many people in the pictures.

Somehow these pictures have ended up being in the book,

which is pretty amazing to me, because I didn't select them.

I work with three other editors.

So this is their selection and these are just really poor quality photocopies,

work prints of the lay out of the book.

When I come back to Ireland I'll be shooting videos, as well as taking stills.

This picture here is from the video.

My mother never came back to Ireland, only for funerals.

The reason my mother left Ireland was due to religious intolerance.

She was Catholic and she married a Protestant.

And because of that, none of her family ever spoke to her again.

That's the story, so to have her in the book -

her eyes and a bit of antitheticity coming across is pretty good,

but, again, that's too close to me to put in the book.

But the fact that someone who doesn't know that story has put it in the book, that's great.

Here's an early picture of my father.

He loved the land more than anything,

but, nevertheless, he left the land and moved to England.

How you put a set of pictures together, to add up to a lot more than the individual pictures,

is a whole other art form.

I don't know what happens during that process.

And that's the best thing,

finding pictures which you didn't know would work, that do work.

It also depends how they're presented.

Looking at this latest version, makes me feel... It's scary.

This is the final version.

It makes me think, when we were earlier in Hickson's,

photographing upstairs there, it was absolutely incredible.

This is the final edit.

Should I rush home and look at what I've got, because maybe we've got

something really special that's better than that. I don't know.

Often in my books, the pictures are there not necessarily a great photo in itself,

but as a part of a body of work which adds up,

like different lines of a poem maybe.

A kind of artistic form where it won't just be a document telling you something,

it will be a picture that you can look at again and again and interpret in different ways, I hope.

SHOUTING AND CHEERING

# Oh the green and red of Mayo

# I can see it still

# Its soft and craggy bog lands

# Its tall majestic hills

# Where the ocean kisses Ireland

# And the waves caress its shore

# Oh, the feeling it came over... #

This is Mayo, they've reached the final.

They've often come close, you know, and never won big things.

They're just crazy about football.

This kind of situation I've been in so many times.

I've photographed at Anfield, I'd hang around the streets outside.

In Liverpool, it was the culture of the city.

So how could I not? It was a very exciting place to go.

A bad result today, so... People weren't really expecting it,

but, you know, it would have been great.

-BAND:

-# The waves caress its shore

-CROWD JOIN IN

# Oh, the feeling that came over me

# Will stay for ever more For ever more... #

One more time, here we go!

# Oh, the green and red of Mayo... #

Sing it!

You work out strategies, you know, how to work.

In all kinds of situations, whether the football, or the Dock Road,

and you're weighing up, "Have I got a right to take this picture,

"what would happen if I take this picture?"

At the same time, you know you've got to take it now, or the moment will be gone.

I moved to Merseyside in 1978

and, on the corner, was a nightclub called the Chelsea Reach.

MUSIC: "Electric Dreams" by The Human League

And look at all these faces.

I like faces and all this material, I thought, "Wow,

"could I can photograph this?"

I was too shy and scared, you know.

It was so noisy, people were drunk,

they'd think you were a pervert and so on.

# I only knew you for a while I never saw your smile...

If it was easy, if I was invisible, I wouldn't have those kind of tensions,

it probably wouldn't be as good, I wouldn't be as involved, maybe.

I did it really seriously from '84 to '86.

I say seriously, three nights a week I'd go in there.

A lot of the people I would see on the street, they were teenagers, or whatever.

By 1985, they'd be in the club.

They would know from the streets, that made it easier.

I knew I wanted to get the emotion and the feeling.

I was spending my life, my time, looking at them

and they're looking at each other

and Looking For Love seemed OK as a title.

Because I've taken pictures for so long,

I periodically I come across the same people again, later.

I photographed kids in New Brighton when they were kids

and I found myself photographing them with their kids, 20 years later.

I'd always give pictures back to people. It seems only natural.

If I had things done with the pictures,

like they ended up in books or exhibitions

and those people were in the pictures, or people they know,

it's a good feeling, I think, to show them this.

Anyway, I ask this girl if I could take a picture of her

and she was there,

stood in the middle of the road, the full moon behind her,

the water still glistening on the road and it was late,

this kind of time of day. It was a long exposure.

I hand-held it, like a quarter of a second, it's not absolutely sharp,

a bit underexposed, but it's a picture.

So it's in the book.

I just had the idea, I'm here, we've got the book,

let's find out if she's still here.

We'll take another picture if she is. You know, what will she think of it?

There can't have been that many girls that age around here in '75, can there?

It doesn't look unlike Ann.

It's not Ann, Tom, because Ann hadn't short hair.

-It's not her hair, Tom.

-It is.

-Ann hasn't short, curly hair.

I'll just ring Ann.

-Ann's hair was straight.

-It was, she never had a perm.

-She had it curly in her 20s.

-That was in her 20s.

-Oh, was it?

-Yeah, 1975.

Oh, then it could be Ann.

-She would have curly hair in her 20s.

-Oh, it could be.

-Ann, did you have curly hair? Did you?

-1975, '76.

-Frances, Ann is saying that it's her.

-But maybe it is, Tom.

-She can remember.

-Maybe it is her.

So it is her! Oh, that's all right, Tom.

Can I put you on? Can I put you on to that man, Ann?

Go on, go on. He's beside me now and he'll be disappointed

if he doesn't talk to the woman in the picture.

No, he's not looking for an old girlfriend!

No, he's married with two kids.

Congrats for finding her. For finding... There was a full moon in the evening, Ann.

Yeah. Hold on.

Hi, hello.

I've just made pictures all these years and, suddenly,

lots of things are happening, books are being published.

Now that's gone in a book, which has gone all over the whole world.

So any of yours in Dublin? Well, they could come to the opening.

We are at a graveyard and it's where my mother's father's family,

my mother's mother's family were buried.

It's great to come and visit someone here.

You get a sense of other stuff, you know, because this is it.

When I came to get this camera, I was always interested in landscapes.

and panoramic format.

My favourite photographer in the whole world was this Czech photographer called Josef Sudec.

He did these wonderful panoramic pictures, as well.

OK. Doing the work is as adventure.

An adventure means going somewhere you don't know where you're going,

particularly why you're going there. What does it mean? You find out when you get there.

So I deal with this landscape and then how it works as a picture,

not my meaning I'm imposing on it.

I used to paint, I used to paint abstractly.

The process of making pictures affects me,

just like the process of painting affects me.

OK. I give up. I'm going to go around the outside.

Through that process of trying

and looking and trying and looking, you get closer.

And something becomes interesting.

So you take a picture and you think, "Ah, no, that wasn't..."

You get that involved - decisions, concentration,

then you go on and try another one.

And, after a few minutes, half an hour,

you're forgetting what you're doing, you're just doing it.

So, on a good day, working seriously, I might shoot ten rolls.

Um, average day, three or four rolls.

And, suddenly, it's three hours later and you might have got a picture.

Over the years, I've never made any money doing this. Photography is really expensive -

you shoot a lot of film, the film's expensive,

you pay for them to be processed, you have to make work prints -

if you don't work commercially.

My way of working was I taught BTEC photography.

I did that two days a week and took photographs five days a week

and my wife worked.

Things were OK, but I never made any serious money.

In many years, I'd make a loss.

Partly, it's my own fault, because I never wanted to finish anything,

I wanted to carry on working on something over and over again,

kept too many balls up in the air, never completed a project.

People could tell where you're coming from.

So, if I did it for free, you know,

out of kind of love for the situation and the people, that seemed a fair exchange.

I'm kind of stealing the pictures, in a way, but I'm giving all this stuff back.

Because it will be there, one day, for those people.

So that's the way I work.

I didn't want to be anybody.

When galleries started representing me

and I was selling prints, I couldn't believe it.

And here I am now where, you know, lots of recognition,

some print sales, shows all over the world.

And a lot more people are enthusiastic

and like photography, so it's really good.

MUSIC: "Over Here Photie Man" by Steve Roberts

# He didn't treat us with suspicion

# We didn't knock his camera Out of his hand

# And from the Chelsea To the Floral Pavilion

# We'd shout out, "Over here, photie man"

# He caught us kissing Who we shouldn't

# Found us dressed up And dancing to Wham

# And from late evening To the early morning

# We were life for the photie man. #