The Gallery of Photography in Meeting House Square in Dublin’s Temple Bar area is currently hosting an exhibition by Tom Wood. Wood was born in the west of Ireland in 1951 but grew up in England. The exhibition is a reworking of his extensive set of images made over forty years and featuring street life in England. The exhibition is presented as ‘Men and Women’ without a narrative or chronology and so allows issues of gender to be explored by the viewer as well as allowing glimpses of the relationship between the documentary photographer and the subject.
Serendipitously, the National Photographic Archive, also in the Meeting House Square, is currently holding an exhibition of documentary photography from the national archives entitled ‘working lives’ based on the Mason and Poole collections from the national library of Ireland. this exhibition features Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th Century. Also serendipitously, at the time of viewing the exhibition I happened to have just spent time making my way through Robert Doisneau images in a small book published by Taschen and curated/edited by Jean Claude Gautrand (2012) Clearly, the subjective documentary style in Doisneau’s work in which the participants are complicit in the image making (see his famous ‘Kiss’ image for an example of this) is subtly different from Wood’s approach. Woods imbues his image making with somewhat less humour but similar empathy for example here and here.
The exhibition runs until mid January 2014.
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