Tom Wood’s homage to Liverpool travels to Moscow

Irish-born Tom Wood is a prolific photographer. Over the past 40 years, he has taken pictures nearly every day, documenting the lives of friends, family members and strangers in Liverpool’s Merseyside. His photos capture life on the streets, in pubs, markets and football grounds, turning the everyday into something far more lyrical.

For one project Wood, who does not drive, travelled across the city by bus taking more than 100,000 photos of his fellow riders. The result was Bus Odyssey, a painstakingly edited book of Liverpool’s buses and the people who take them. Images from that collection are included in Britain 1973-2012, a retrospective of his work currently on show at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation in Moscow.

“I make what you might call real-life photographs”

Yet despite his devotion to his subjects, Wood rejects descriptions of his work as documentary. “I’m just interested in good photography,” he told the Guardian in October 2012. “I’m not a documentarist. I am not trying to document anything. It’s more about deciphering and transforming. I make what you might call real-life photographs.” The current exhibition at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation includes images not only from Bus Odyssey (1999) and Photie Man (2005), the name given to him by the kids on the streets of New Brighton.

The exhibition runs until 12 May.