Fifty Years of The Photie Man : TOM WOOD

Another Magazine - Tom Wood : 50 Years of the Photie man

My old fellow student from Leicester Fine Art Painting School (73-76) the fine photographer Tom Wood celebrated 50 years of his work since we graduated 

see here at Another Mag (link above) 

Quite what a photographer was doing in the Painting school is anyone’s guess but we had filmmakers too (John Davies) experimental sculptors (Andrew Ryder) and an eclectic bag besides

Tom’s Archive

Show in Liverpool:

Tom Wood at The Walker Art Gallery 20 May 2023—7 Jan 2024

PHOTIEMAN

more here

Ireland

Ireland 

A FEAST FOR THE EYES

For the new exhibition at The Photographer's Gallery comes this crass little gem. If it is meant to be funny it is lost on me! Amongst the most patronising of our reportage photographers former president of the legendary Magnum group who largely are known for supporting and saluting the artist/photographer, I guess photo journalists are included too*. 

I find the work of Parr extremely tiresome and pointless, like so much commercial photojournalism, tomorrow's chip paper he seemed so fond of (sic) derivative of the work of much better true art-photographers than he, from the legendary (Tony Ray Jones) to the contemporary (Tom Wood, Paddy Summerfield, Peter Mitchell and Peter Fraser) Parr's work is in essence superficial and schnide and deeply condescending towards it's subject (the one thing that the work of Summerfield, Wood and Ray-Jones never is or was, containing as they do genuine human warmth towards their subjects.  

Parr has since opened the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol largely being a vanity project consisting of collections of his own work and his collection of printed ephemera from wall paper samples to prostitute calling cards in the old telephone boxes (what WERE you doing in THERE Martin?). 
Parr claims in his wiki entry to have been inspired by the great American photographers Joel Meyerwitz , William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, frankly he is not even remotely in the same league. His fellow students at Manchester like Daniel Meadows and Brian Griffin are infinitely more expressive and genuinely interesting whose work generates and rewards frequent return visits, like much of the best of great art, Parr's work sadly does not. Once you 'get' it the work bears little value in viewing it ever again. Still he is nothing if not certain of his own worth, who else opens their own foundation to spread their own work!?

Recipe of the Month...

Martin Parr's Beans on Toast

Ingredients:2 x slices of white bread
1 x tin of beans

Method:
1. Toast bread
2. Heat beans
3. Tip onto buttered toast (very important - the toast needs to be buttered, no marg allowed!)
4. Serve

REALLY?

Just how patronising can one man get!? Ever scornful to the classes and especially condescending towards the lower or working class, Parr would find this presumably funny (Martin it really isn't!) as for the recipe, what IS that 'butter not margarine' dig and how do you imagine this to be funny? (Marg being known as being the spread of choice for those who could not afford butter)
 It summarises all that I detest about this man's work, it has unplumbed shallows! Beans on Toast a known meal of the working class, I imagine by now Parr and his kith feast on anything but. Patronising as ever whilst having their tea, kedgeree and afternoon tiffen laughing all the way to the bank.

Feast for The Eyes - The Photographer's Gallery

 #FeastForTheEyes

*the master photographer Philip Jones Griffiths objected and wrote to all fellow Magnum panellists  to try to stop Parr even becoming a member!)

KEITH JARRETT

Now I adored Keith Jarrett as an art student and was turned on to him by the master photographer Tom Wood, who was my peer in the art department at Leicester Poly (now De Montfort University) way back in the mid-seventies

Big O has posted two sets on ROIO over the past two days from 1974 and they are both worth checking out

Keith Jarrett - Jazz Workshop Boston - The American Quartet 1974

The 38 minute  'The Rich and The Poor/ Death and The Flower' is extraordinary and yet somehow the following two numbers leave me a tad cold. I found them more 'traditional' in the sense of no surprises and rather predictable . . . . . it is after all Jarrett's piano work that grabs me! The American Quartet whilst the more famous in Hayden, Motion and Redman sounds rather dated to these ears now.

Keith Jarrett - The European Quartet - Hannover 1974

Again some astonishing moments in this and whilst I could do without the Garbarek it is a fine fine recording

The Essence of Britishness, Through the Eyes of an Under-Recognized Portrait Photographer

the work of John Myers

I wasn't sure whether I knew the work of John Myers but it reminds me of the work of fellow art student back in the day, as they say, of fine art photographer Tom Wood. 


The New Yorker magazine did a spread

The Essence of Britishness, Through the Eyes of an Under-Recognized Portrait PhotographerIn the spring of 1972, a British photographer named John Myers, then in his late twenties, started taking portraits of his neighbors in and around the town of Stourbridge, in England’s West Midlands. He worked principally with a five-by-four-inch Gandolfi plate camera. His subjects were ordinary men, women, and children, usually portrayed alone, though sometimes grouped together. Very few were smiling, and none looked at the camera with an aspect more optimistic than that of mild resignation. For this viewer, who grew up in nineteen-seventies England, there is a recognizable quality of Britishness to Myers’s pictures, whether or not it is explicitly signalled. The image chosen to open the book, “David in Knight’s Armour,” from 1974, shows a small boy dressed in Crusader’s regalia and brandishing a plastic sword, a lion rampant on his breastplate. In one image, a leather-clad motorcyclist has decorated his bike with a small Union Jack; in another, a proud car salesman displays the British flag above the desk in his office. But the Englishness is evident, too, in the irremediably damp crevices in the brickwork of buildings or between the paving stones of sidewalks, and in the hunched shoulders of Myers’s subjects, many of whom look to be feeling a little chilly, physically and emotionally. In their formal poses, they seem as conscious of their status as the objects of an artist’s gaze as any Renaissance Pope or Regency monarch.

New Yorker - John Myers by Rebecca Mead

“Terry and Linda in their Flat,” 1973

“Richard Smith,” 1973

“Michelle,” 1974

“Robert,” 1973.

“Young Girl,” 1973

“Paul and Richard,” 1973.

“David in Knight’s Armour,” 1974.

“Motorcyclist and Combination,” 1973.

"Green Lane, Lye" - 1973

Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.”