MA Photographic History and Practice 6 December 2009 Damian Hughes (Student No

DMU: MA Photographic History and Practice 6 December 2009 Damian Hughes (Student No. 09282275)

RESEARCH METHODS ASSIGNMENT

The Art of the Participant Observer: The ethnographic impulse in Tom Wood’s photography.

ABSTRACT

Titian Mother stands as representative of Tom wood’s photography. Over thirty years, Tom Wood has sought to understand and to describe the people and place of New Brighton and Liverpool, describing always from a public and highly visible vantage point – returning repeatedly to photograph in the same locations, often photographing the same people. Wood resists social documentary descriptions of his work, preferring to characterise what he does as simply ‘recording’ what is in front of the camera. This paper discusses the implications of this stance in relation to Wood’s photography. It explores the work in a range of contexts which, together, provide a fuller understanding of Wood’s work as ethnographic in character, whilst remaining visually and aesthetically reliant upon a number of identifiable strands in the history of photographic practice and more broadly referential of Wood’s experience and knowledge of Western painting. The discussion identifies the strands, in Wood’s work, of early social documentary photography, from John Thomson in late nineteenth century London and Lewis Hine in early twentieth century New York onwards, and of British ‘street’ photography from Bill Brandt to the present day. Attention is also drawn to a lineage of ethnographic photography, discerning connections between early anthropological imagery, the portraiture of August Sander, the photography of Mass Observation and contemporary ethnographic studies, finding stylistic markers of all these in Tom Wood’s photographs. In particular, the paper discusses a central notion of ethnographic methodology – that of participant observation – as a model for Tom wood’s working practice and the engaged intimacy of the resulting work, whilst retaining awareness of key cultural and visual (pre)conceptions - including Wood’s Irish immigrant background, his education as an artist and painter and received notions of northern English character - by which the work may be informed.

1 DMU: MA Photographic History and Practice 6 December 2009 Damian Hughes (Student No. 09282275)

RESEARCH METHODS ASSIGNMENT

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RESEARCH METHODS ASSIGNMENT

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