This presentation brings together a group of photographs from the very beginning of Tom Wood’s photographic practice. Made in the summer of 1975, having just finished studying Fine Art Painting at Leicester Polytechnic, these images all originate from the first rolls of film he ever exposed.
Working in and around North Evington, Leicester, Wood photographed the social environments immediately around him: children and mothers at the Highfields Community Centre, street portraits in the surrounding neighbourhoods, backstage scenes at the North Evington Working Men’s Club, and later that summer the atmosphere of the Free Peoples Music Festival in Oxfordshire.
Seen today, these early photographs already reveal the foundations of Wood’s later work: a deeply empathetic engagement with everyday life, an intuitive understanding of social space, and a remarkable sensitivity toward the presence of ordinary people. Rather than observing from a distance, Wood’s camera moves within the rhythms of the communities he encountered.
All photographs are presented as analog black-and-white hand prints, emphasizing the material qualities of the original negatives and the tactile dimension of traditional darkroom practice.
Despite his growing international recognition, Tom Wood remains in many ways a photographer still to be fully discovered. Often considered an “insider’s photographer,” his work occupies a singular position within British photography. In its depth of observation and human engagement, Wood’s work stands alongside that of figures such as Martin Parr, Chris Killip, and other key voices of postwar British photography, while maintaining a distinctly personal and independent vision.
Presented together for the first time in this form at Photo London, these early works offer a rare insight into the origins of one of the most compelling and still under-recognized voices in contemporary British photography.